The fruit was sinful taken from a tree...
...so the sin must be reckoned with on a Tree.
The man and his wife returned down into the dust...
...so the Man, with His Bride, must arise from the ground.
Friday, July 27, 2012
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Living a Life of Repentance
I've been told many, many times that one of the key virtues of a Christian life is repentance. That is, turning away from sin and towards God: daily, hourly, minute-ly, etc. This make sense. At least, it makes sense if we believe ourselves to be so embroiled in sin, post-justification, post-start-of-sanctification, post-salvation (at least the beginning parts of it), that we cannot exist without sinning. In that case, a life of repentance is utterly necessary and utterly impossible (and not only from man's standpoint, but also God's, since He was unable to break sin's yoke over you either at the Cross or at the "moment" of faith -- but that is another story for another day: I'm hoping to *eventually* publish an article about this theological snafu).
But...what if, when we are brought into a right relationship with God (whether you want to call that salvation or justification or just plain bliss), the stranglehold of sin is broken and we can, theoretically, live without sin's domineering presence in our lives? I'm not arguing for perfectionism, that is, a human's ability to totally conquer sin this side of the general resurrection so that there is no spiritual or moral struggle. I am arguing for a Christian's power to conquer temptation and sin through great striving in the Spirit (for starters, it takes "praying without ceasing" -- something very few have been able to accomplish), a striving that, if Ephesians 5 is to be believed, will continue on with us until the time of our mortal demise: that is, we have changed sides in the cosmic war, but that doesn't mean the war is over. Rather, the war, for us, is now just begun, or at least our part in it.
And one of the things that happens is that sin, even though its power has been effectively broken by the Cross, still calls to us. To change sides, to change allegiances (that is, to change pistis, faith), and to come back over. A life of repentance, then, is one in which we recognize which side we are on and stay put.
I find this martial imagery to be very illuminating, especially when counseling students. Many, and this once included myself, belived that once you sinned, you are, effectively, out of the family. You are condemned where you stand. For some, this means that any sin constitutes a need for a "new" salvation, since the old one has been irrevocably lost. However, if you are shot at during a war, that doesn't mean you work for the enemy. If, once you've been shot at, you have a change of heart and realize that the other side is "in the right" and you defect, then, yes, you do work for the other side. There is a technical theological term for this: apostasy. This is what is condemned, for example, in Hebrews 6. Being shot at, though, or even taking a hit and falling down, or not carrying through an order ("transgressing the command," as it were), does not constitute apostasy. Just sin. Something to avoid next time, to ask the Commander for clarification, for help, for assistance, for (sometimes) reassignment. Sometimes, alas, the shots wound us deep, shrapnel cuts and we wonder why we must live with this (I have students who struggle, valiantly, with same-sex attraction: I often think this might be a helpful heuristic category, but I'd have to ask them first): but this is not apostasy -- it is possible to be a faithful soldier and struggle with some deep wound.
Strangely, or maybe not, this isn't what I originally set out to write. I wanted to write about how death is what we repent from, that is, from the lifestyle and works of death, which characterize the old world, the old self. This is what produces sin in us, but something else came out. At any rate, may it be to the glory of God and may He forgive me where I've misstepped.
But...what if, when we are brought into a right relationship with God (whether you want to call that salvation or justification or just plain bliss), the stranglehold of sin is broken and we can, theoretically, live without sin's domineering presence in our lives? I'm not arguing for perfectionism, that is, a human's ability to totally conquer sin this side of the general resurrection so that there is no spiritual or moral struggle. I am arguing for a Christian's power to conquer temptation and sin through great striving in the Spirit (for starters, it takes "praying without ceasing" -- something very few have been able to accomplish), a striving that, if Ephesians 5 is to be believed, will continue on with us until the time of our mortal demise: that is, we have changed sides in the cosmic war, but that doesn't mean the war is over. Rather, the war, for us, is now just begun, or at least our part in it.
And one of the things that happens is that sin, even though its power has been effectively broken by the Cross, still calls to us. To change sides, to change allegiances (that is, to change pistis, faith), and to come back over. A life of repentance, then, is one in which we recognize which side we are on and stay put.
I find this martial imagery to be very illuminating, especially when counseling students. Many, and this once included myself, belived that once you sinned, you are, effectively, out of the family. You are condemned where you stand. For some, this means that any sin constitutes a need for a "new" salvation, since the old one has been irrevocably lost. However, if you are shot at during a war, that doesn't mean you work for the enemy. If, once you've been shot at, you have a change of heart and realize that the other side is "in the right" and you defect, then, yes, you do work for the other side. There is a technical theological term for this: apostasy. This is what is condemned, for example, in Hebrews 6. Being shot at, though, or even taking a hit and falling down, or not carrying through an order ("transgressing the command," as it were), does not constitute apostasy. Just sin. Something to avoid next time, to ask the Commander for clarification, for help, for assistance, for (sometimes) reassignment. Sometimes, alas, the shots wound us deep, shrapnel cuts and we wonder why we must live with this (I have students who struggle, valiantly, with same-sex attraction: I often think this might be a helpful heuristic category, but I'd have to ask them first): but this is not apostasy -- it is possible to be a faithful soldier and struggle with some deep wound.
Strangely, or maybe not, this isn't what I originally set out to write. I wanted to write about how death is what we repent from, that is, from the lifestyle and works of death, which characterize the old world, the old self. This is what produces sin in us, but something else came out. At any rate, may it be to the glory of God and may He forgive me where I've misstepped.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
On Consumerism
I've heard a lot of sermons about finance and consumerism. I've spoken a lot about consumerism and economics (although, methinks, that my economics is decidedly different from my earlier stint with the Austrians). We all know it is a problem. We all know greed is a sin. But we cannot seem to do anything about it.
Take, for example, your fairly typical evangelical church in America. At least stereotypically speaking (and I think this mostly bears out, at least from my experience), the folks are at least middle class, sometimes upper, sometimes lower, sometimes a mix. There is, even if middle class folks are often worried about their financial status, a lot of money floating around in there. Enough to supply the salaries for an eccleisal bureaucracy (not quite as formal as a hierarchy, but probably exerting more control): senior pastor, associate paster, worship pastor, children's pastor, youth pastor(s), secretaries and support staff for all the above. This is not necessarily a bad thing -- sometimes it is necessary to do the work that the Church has set out to do.
More than this support of an ecclesial structure that could rival medieval Rome, most of these folks live middle class lifestyles: cable tv, cable internet, house large enough for at least 1.5 familes, stuff stored in a storage facility (for a monthly fee), kids in umpteen sports with umpteen expenses, etc. Fairly normal Americana. In other words, we live consumerism.
A few sermons, or even a sermon about it every week, aren't going to change that.
It must be lived. Rather, we must die to it. We must be martyrs to the world, even though it is the good gift of God.
In other words, we must be monks. Or, at least some of us should be. All of us need some ascesis, some discipline in our lives, but not all of us can be monks. Or can we?
The question really is: what is a monk? Of course, the historical image is that of a self-mortifying, poverty-striken, silent celibate with a funny haircut (I've had that haircut). But that isn't a monk. To fall into Aristotelian categories: those are the accidents of a monk, not the substance. Rather, the substance is someone whose allegiances have been firmly and (theoretically) finally shifted away from the transient to the eternal. Someone who can let go of, say, a number of meals so that hunger will not control their actions -- someone who can teach the hungry not to steal, but rather to pray for those who have, but whose hearts are closed up and whose souls are in much more peril for their inhospitality to the "least of these." Also, with the money saved from not eating, a meal (or two or three) can be bought and served to these "least of these" -- saying "be warmed and filled" without warming and filling is a capital sin: it is saying that the words we speak have no bearing on reality, that is, that the Word is not in our words. Let the speaker beware.
A monk is one who can give up earthly prosperity so that the world can be rich with the Spirit of Christ through prayer. Think with me, for just one moment, about what would happen in our world if we all gathered for prayer before work, during lunch, and after work. The workday would either have to get prohibitively long or, more likely, much shorter: work would be subservient to prayer. The Almighty Dollar would be dethroned and put in its proper place: as a tool in the service of the Prince of Peace, the healer of the blind, the lame, the deaf, the sick, and the dying. Plus we would see what the truly important work is: mercy.
In other words, I see no reason that we cannot have married monks, single monks, communities of monkish delight, and regular old monasteries doing the work of God. Everyone is called to this sort of monkish sacrifice: this is because monkery is simply martyrdom in a peaceful time. We still need witnesses to Christ in the world, but (God be praised) we aren't actively persecuted for our faith, nor are we (in America, I'm speaking of here) put to death for our confession. That means, if we want to share in the death of Christ, we need to put to death all those things that distract our attention from Him: so that we might receive them again, transfigured, glorified, filled with the Spirit, for the good of the world.
This means we are going to need a Rule of Life. That is what I am beginning to work on with my family and my church. Pray for us.
Take, for example, your fairly typical evangelical church in America. At least stereotypically speaking (and I think this mostly bears out, at least from my experience), the folks are at least middle class, sometimes upper, sometimes lower, sometimes a mix. There is, even if middle class folks are often worried about their financial status, a lot of money floating around in there. Enough to supply the salaries for an eccleisal bureaucracy (not quite as formal as a hierarchy, but probably exerting more control): senior pastor, associate paster, worship pastor, children's pastor, youth pastor(s), secretaries and support staff for all the above. This is not necessarily a bad thing -- sometimes it is necessary to do the work that the Church has set out to do.
More than this support of an ecclesial structure that could rival medieval Rome, most of these folks live middle class lifestyles: cable tv, cable internet, house large enough for at least 1.5 familes, stuff stored in a storage facility (for a monthly fee), kids in umpteen sports with umpteen expenses, etc. Fairly normal Americana. In other words, we live consumerism.
A few sermons, or even a sermon about it every week, aren't going to change that.
It must be lived. Rather, we must die to it. We must be martyrs to the world, even though it is the good gift of God.
In other words, we must be monks. Or, at least some of us should be. All of us need some ascesis, some discipline in our lives, but not all of us can be monks. Or can we?
The question really is: what is a monk? Of course, the historical image is that of a self-mortifying, poverty-striken, silent celibate with a funny haircut (I've had that haircut). But that isn't a monk. To fall into Aristotelian categories: those are the accidents of a monk, not the substance. Rather, the substance is someone whose allegiances have been firmly and (theoretically) finally shifted away from the transient to the eternal. Someone who can let go of, say, a number of meals so that hunger will not control their actions -- someone who can teach the hungry not to steal, but rather to pray for those who have, but whose hearts are closed up and whose souls are in much more peril for their inhospitality to the "least of these." Also, with the money saved from not eating, a meal (or two or three) can be bought and served to these "least of these" -- saying "be warmed and filled" without warming and filling is a capital sin: it is saying that the words we speak have no bearing on reality, that is, that the Word is not in our words. Let the speaker beware.
A monk is one who can give up earthly prosperity so that the world can be rich with the Spirit of Christ through prayer. Think with me, for just one moment, about what would happen in our world if we all gathered for prayer before work, during lunch, and after work. The workday would either have to get prohibitively long or, more likely, much shorter: work would be subservient to prayer. The Almighty Dollar would be dethroned and put in its proper place: as a tool in the service of the Prince of Peace, the healer of the blind, the lame, the deaf, the sick, and the dying. Plus we would see what the truly important work is: mercy.
In other words, I see no reason that we cannot have married monks, single monks, communities of monkish delight, and regular old monasteries doing the work of God. Everyone is called to this sort of monkish sacrifice: this is because monkery is simply martyrdom in a peaceful time. We still need witnesses to Christ in the world, but (God be praised) we aren't actively persecuted for our faith, nor are we (in America, I'm speaking of here) put to death for our confession. That means, if we want to share in the death of Christ, we need to put to death all those things that distract our attention from Him: so that we might receive them again, transfigured, glorified, filled with the Spirit, for the good of the world.
This means we are going to need a Rule of Life. That is what I am beginning to work on with my family and my church. Pray for us.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
An all too brief thought on Theodicy
Theodicy is the question of how God and evil can coexist. Or, why do bad things happen to good people? Or, how can a good God allow so much suffering? The questions are hard, especially since they put God in the dock, and then Christians are asked to divine what God might say in response (He did respond in Job -- but His response is notoriously dense).
The response, though, is the Cross of Jesus Christ, God Himself partaking of the degradation, the oppression, the injustice of the world, so that life, His Life, might reing through the resurrection. This Life is to be lived out through the Church, which has notoriously failed in very public ways (May God have mercy on all!).
So, the only response from a Christian, as far as I can tell is this: there is a lot of suffering in the world. We have been given the job of addressing and correcting it -- that is what it means to be a Christian, practically. Often we don't do it or we do a poor job of it. But the calling remains. We are to be God's hands. Would you like to help me get food to the hungry? Clean water to the thirsty? Justice to the oppressed? Let's talk to others who are already doing those things and support them in any way we can -- even if it means suffering ourselves. We need to actually do the work, just like Jesus touched and healed lepers and dead people, and even was put to death so that we could have life to share with others.
Obviously, I've left much out. Forgive me for that. Sometimes it is better to work than to talk. Sometimes faith can only be understood through action: Christ died and rose again for the life of the world.
The response, though, is the Cross of Jesus Christ, God Himself partaking of the degradation, the oppression, the injustice of the world, so that life, His Life, might reing through the resurrection. This Life is to be lived out through the Church, which has notoriously failed in very public ways (May God have mercy on all!).
So, the only response from a Christian, as far as I can tell is this: there is a lot of suffering in the world. We have been given the job of addressing and correcting it -- that is what it means to be a Christian, practically. Often we don't do it or we do a poor job of it. But the calling remains. We are to be God's hands. Would you like to help me get food to the hungry? Clean water to the thirsty? Justice to the oppressed? Let's talk to others who are already doing those things and support them in any way we can -- even if it means suffering ourselves. We need to actually do the work, just like Jesus touched and healed lepers and dead people, and even was put to death so that we could have life to share with others.
Obviously, I've left much out. Forgive me for that. Sometimes it is better to work than to talk. Sometimes faith can only be understood through action: Christ died and rose again for the life of the world.
Sunday, July 08, 2012
"Who is God? The Son Reveals the Father": Sermon on Luke 15:11-32
Here is the sermon text from today's message at Washington Union Alliance Church (CMA) in New Castle, Pa. I'll have the audio uploaded soon. There are differences between the text and the audio, as I felt free to leave my notes and extempore or tell a joke here and there. To God be all the glory.
I do want to thank the church for their kind and generous reception of my family and me. May God bless their efforts to live His Kingdom out in New Castle.
______________________________________
Text: Luke 15:11-32 (The Prodigal Son)
In the parable of the Prodigal Son, we meet two children who, although they are in the same family, do not know their father. The first hates him enough to wish his death; the second assumes he is miserly and selfish. This is an important lesson for all Christians, since we claim to know the Father and the Son and the holy Spirit.
When we come to Church, we assume that we are worshipping the right God, the “only true God,” as Jesus puts it in John’s Gospel. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here. But, how do we know that the God we have assembled here to honor and serve is the God, the Creator of the universe, the one worthy of our acclamation and our lives? I raise this question because it seems that within the Christian world there are “many gods and many lords” (as the Apostle Paul speaks about it), but “for us there” should be “one God, the Father…and one Lord Jesus Christ.” The Christian God is often seen as either for all American wars, regardless of their justification, or against any wars, no matter how just they might actually be. We are told that God is vengeful and angry; yet He is Love. Placards, splayed over the evening news, read “God hates…” whatever group is not like the protestors, whether that is homosexuals, or soldiers, or even the Amish. There seems to be great confusion as to who God is and how we are to live in light of that. However, there is only one God and He is not the author of confusion: we must wade through this quagmire, this miry clay as Psalm 40 calls it, to the point where we can say not only that we believe in God (which James tells us even the demons do), but that we know Him and, more importantly, that He knows us.
Why, though, is it important to know God? Wouldn’t it just be easier to offer up some sacrifice, whether an animal or some prayer, to an all-powerful Being that we just don’t understand? Most of human history, it seems, has functioned this way. Luke tells us the story of Paul’s encounter with the “unknown god” in Acts 17: this ‘god’ had delivered them from plague and floods when all the other gods of the Grecian world had failed. Paul, though, will not let them stay in ignorance, for “God now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom He has ordained.” Maybe it would be easier to offer to some “unknown God” that all spiritual paths lead to, but in the reality of the situation, it is certainly not safer. Justice is coming – the Judge is at the doors!
But judgment isn’t the only reason that we should seek to truly know God. One genuinely true law of spirituality is that “we become like what we worship.” That is, whatever god we worship, we take on their traits. If we worship a god who is always wrathful and angry, we ourselves will become wrathful and angry. We see that with the “God hates…” crowd. If we worship a god who is kindly and benevolent, without any sense of justice or truth, we become soft and easily taken advantage of: it is a sad story of our country that many mainline Christian denominations have followed this path. The Apostle Peter, in his second epistle, says that we are to be “partakers of the divine nature.” We must ask who God is because we’re going to be like Him.
The language of “partaking of the divine nature” may sound strange. We talk much more often of salvation or redemption and even sanctification; however this language is very close to what God intended in the very beginning. In Genesis 1:26, the Word says “Let Us make man in our Image, according to Our likeness.” Somehow, in a very mysterious way, we partook of God’s image, His very nature. That image involved being in God’s likeness as well. We were supposed to act like God Himself. The Genesis passage continues, explaining this: “let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Adam and Eve were set up as lords of the world; however there was a proviso: they could not eat from one of the trees in the midst of the garden God planted for them. The reason given was that “on the day you eat of it you will be liable to death.” This divine warning is very important: if you disobey, Adam, you will be cut off from what makes you live – right now, you have perfect communion with Me and I have given you every good gift, including the Tree of Life in the midst of the Garden, so you will live forever in peace and joy. God knows that this will be a struggle for the newly formed image-bearers, yet He entrusts the task to them.
We may be surprised, then, to learn that when the serpent deceives Eve, he does so through their desire to be like God. This desire to partake of the divine nature is not a bad thing: man and woman were made in the image and likeness of God. However, the serpent tells Eve (and the text tells us that Adam was with her, silent the whole time: she was deceived, Adam went in with full knowledge) that they have yet to become like God, knowing good and evil. The reason that God withheld the tree was not to grow them in obedience, but rather to separate Himself from them, the ones created in His very image and likeness! The serpent’s condemnation is just. Why did Adam and Eve, who should have known better, take the bait and eat from the tree? The Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 1:21-22: “although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools.” It started with false worship in which they became unthankful. Then they became futile in their thoughts and started to believe in another god, not the God who had selflessly made them and entrusted them with the Garden, but a petty, miserly god who selfishly kept back secrets all to himself. They became like what they worshipped: Adam selfishly blames Eve and God Himself for the predicament, instead of repenting and seeking God’s mercy. Because of this we are trapped in the “corruption that is in the world through lust,” as Peter puts it, summarizing the effects of Adam’s sin. When we have a wrong knowledge of who God is, we worship wrongly and become corrupted at our cores.
Who God is matters because we are to be like Him, in both the here-and-now, and in eternity when “we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is” (I John 3:2). So, to the question at hand: who is God?
A few provisos on our quest would be helpful. I am an academic by training, so I apologize that a seemingly simple question as “who is God” takes a million years to arrive at. Things must be made somewhat convoluted, otherwise how would we turn these sorts of questions into articles and books?
The first proviso is that when we are attempting to answer “who” someone is, whether that is God or our spouses or ourselves, we are asking “how” that person thinks and acts. I know my wife because of the way she acts towards me and towards God and towards our community. My wife knows me the same way: my hope is that I portray a consistent image of who I am. Here is where faith comes in: we must trust that the actions are true revelations of the other or ourselves. We project an image of who we are by our actions, so if we know God’s actions, we know what it means to be made “in His image” and can act accordingly.
The second proviso is like the first: we cannot understand God without considering the action that is Jesus Christ. John’s Gospel says “No one has seen God at any time – the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has interpreted Him.” If we want to speak truly of God, and even more importantly to know Him and thus have eternal Life, we must speak of and know Jesus Christ. This means that looking at the actions of and listening to the words of Jesus Christ will show us the “who” and “how” of God. All the stories about God in the Bible make sense in the light of Jesus Christ. So anything we read in the Bible, whether the judgment of Sodom or the Conquest of Canaan must be read with a single question in mind: “how does this story prepare for or teach about the Incarnation, the Suffering, the Death, and Resurrection of Jesus the Christ?”
We do not have time, alas, to go through the whole Scriptures to uncover this God, although if you wanted to get a start on it this afternoon, might I recommend meditating on 1 Corinthians 10? For our purposes now, though, we must concentrate on Jesus Himself as the revealer, the interpreter for us, of God. Let us briefly speak of Jesus’ teaching, his parables, and the way in which he acted as entrances into the knowledge of God the Father.
At the end of Matthew 5, in the middle of the “Sermon on the Mount,” Jesus says something very striking and challenging: “Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” What does it mean to be perfect as God is perfect? Jesus explains a few verses earlier, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you: that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so?” What is God’s perfection? It is loving your enemies. While often our reading of the Old Testament is overwhelmed by the scenes of judgment, here Jesus puts a spin on it that we might not have expected: even the wrath of God is meant to bring salvation. God brings judgment, most often it seems on His people, not because He is vindictive or controlled by anger (these are human ways of wrath); but as a loving Father who disciplines in order that Israel might turn from death to Life, from Satan to God. This can be seen clearly, and poignantly, in the book of Ezekiel.
In the midst of the people’s most egregious rebellion, which is detailed in the early chapters of the book, God decides to leave the Temple – to forsake it and allow evil forces to overrun it. The people have started worshipping other gods there, which the only true God cannot abide. So, in chapter 10, the glory of God departs from the Temple. It seems that God has finally forsaken His people. They have become His enemies, so He has left them. Where, though, has He gone? Ezekiel makes it a point to mention that the cherubim, the angels, that carry the glory of God out of the Temple are “the living creatures I saw by the River Chebar.” In Ezekiel 1, he has the vision of these cherubim carrying God’s glory in Babylon, with the exiles who mourn there. God has left the Temple, that is true; God has judged His people with exile, that is true; but God has followed them into exile. “Thus says the Lord God: ‘Although I have cast them off far among the nations, and although I have scattered them among the countries, yet I shall be a little sanctuary for them in the countries where they have gone” (Ez. 11:16). The Apostle Paul puts it in these words, “God demonstrates His own love towards us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us…for…when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son…” (Rom. 5:8, 10). While we were enemies, opposed to God, with the “wrath of God revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness” upon us, God sent His Son to be incarnate, to lead us to truth, to die for us, to rise for us, and to go prepare a place for us. Who is God? The One who loves His enemies. “Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” We must ask, then, who are our enemies? And how can we treat them with justice, mercy, and love – which always involves calling them into a transforming relationship with the One who is justice, mercy, and Love. Then we shall be like God.
While there is much more to be said about Jesus’ teaching, we should shift our focus shortly to His parables. These stories, at once very simple and complex, continue to speak to us, to disarm us, and to remake us, even though we do our labor in a context that often seems far away from fishermen, slaves, and banquet-inviting kings. The Prodigal Son, a well-known and beloved parable, acts in such a way, especially as it reveals to us God the Father through the Son.
The outline of the parable is well-known. A brash and arrogant son says, in effect, “I wish you were dead, dad; can I have some money?” The father, oddly, agrees and sends his wayward boy off with half of his largesse. The son wastes his living on “riotous living” and prostitutes, ending up in the worst place a young Jewish boy could: a Gentile pig farm, begging the pigs for food, “and no one gave him any” (Lk. 15:16). At this point the boy “came to himself” and decided to be but a mere slave in his father’s household. However, the father sees him coming afar off and runs out to him, welcoming him, waving away his self-deprecation, and restores him to full sonship, complete with a homecoming feast. The older brother, whom we have not heard from so far, protests that the father has treated him – the “good boy” – as a slave; never even supplying him with a goat so that he and his friends might party. The father replies, “Son, you are always with me and all that I have is yours.”
This story, in the midst of a few parables about finding that which was lost, is poignant and tender. This is a father that, even in the midst of utter rebellion, loves his son: he daily watches for his repentance, not so that he can be made to feel guilty or ashamed (the son takes that role on himself), but rather so that he can be fully restored to the household. He is also the father that loves the son who never leaves – but that son never really knew his father! He assumed that he was cold and miserly, rather than open-hearted and generous. “Son, you are always with me and all that I have is yours” is something no Christian should ever forget.
This story is told in response to the grumbling of the religious leaders over Jesus’ acceptance of tax collectors, prostitutes, and other sinners and outcasts. How could he bring these unclean into God’s fold? Jesus’ response, about his work, is the story of the father. Jesus here is explicitly linking his own work of welcome to the work of the Father God. The sinners were the younger brother; the religious leaders were the older brother. Jesus takes the role of the welcoming, running, embracing Father. The Son truly reveals the Father. Whatever we see Jesus doing is what God is doing. Since Jesus makes us sons of God, both males and females sharing in this status, what the world see us doing should lead them to see what God continues to do. This is a challenging charge, but God promises us that He is “conforming us to the image of His Son” as Paul says in Romans 8.
Many other parables could be multiplied to show who God is: often stories convey truth better than propositional statements. It is one thing to be told, “God is Love,” it is another thing to hear the story of a father running to embrace his son that, at their last meeting, had wished his premature death. Let us go on, then, to the ultimate revelation of God the Father: the life of Jesus Christ.
In John 14, Jesus is speaking very deep truths to his disciples. He is about to depart to the Cross and the tomb: it is time for him to reveal who he truly is. He says, “If you had known me, you would have known my Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him.” His disciple Philip retorts, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is sufficient for us.” I find that a strange thing to say. Let us remember Exodus 33, where God tells Moses “no man may see My face and live.” Philip saying, “it is sufficient for us” seems an odd request. Yet listen to Christ’s reply: “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father…” To know God, we must know Jesus Christ. If we know Jesus Christ, we have seen and know the Father. If we know the Father, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent, we have eternal life. What does the life of Jesus, then, reveal to us about God the Father?
The ultimate event in Jesus’ life, which all the Gospels speak about, is his death on the cross and subsequent resurrection. The Gospels differ on many things, some stories are told here and omitted there, some parables are highlighted there, while others are neglected here, and so on. But all of them address the suffering, the crucifixion, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. If the Son reveals the Father, then this is the most important piece in the puzzle. God the Father cannot be known without the Cross and Resurrection – these events are the fullest revelation of His character. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son…” “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself…” “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as the mercy-seat by his blood…” and so on. God is revealed as One who went through death for His creatures, that they might be brought back to Him. This is one step further than the father in the Prodigal Son: whereas that father waited for the son to come to his senses, this Father goes while we were “ungodly, sinners, and enemies” to do what we didn’t even want to do. We preferred darkness to the light of God, as John 1 says, and so crucified our God who wanted only our resurrection. Yet what we intended for evil, God intended for good. By going through death, but not deserving it as He never sinned, He trampled down death and raised us up with Christ on the third day. Now we wait for the fullness of that resurrection, expectantly and joyfully, even in the midst of the continuing pain and suffering we face. We can have full assurance of this because God has already done it. Believing this is faith: this is knowledge of the only true God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent.
Through this faith, which is nurtured and guarded by the Church, which is the Body of Christ Himself, we are being remade into the likeness of God, partaking in the divine nature. Time fails us to go any deeper into this, but one thing must be said. If we know God, we know that we must be like Him – we must do the works of God. But, how can we, who are still so weak and prone to sin, do this? God has already done it: we have spoken of the Father and the Son, let us close with a moment on the Spirit, the Breath of God. Our natural breath is our life: if we cease breathing, we cease living. God’s Spirit is His Life, given to us – we have the very Life of God within us, guiding us, loving us, making us more like Christ. All the ways of God are found in Him – we must submit ourselves daily to this Spirit, ask to be filled to the fullest brim with Him, that we might be who and what God has made us to be: in His image and likeness. Paul, in Ephesians 5, lays this out clearly: he talks of how wives should treat husbands and husbands wives, children and parents, parents and children, slaves and masters, masters and slaves. His description breaks down unjust social patterns that these folks living in the Greco-Roman culture would have found second nature. [Extemporaneous about how Ephesians 5 does this – you’ll have to listen to the audio recording] But how is this possible? Note verses 15-21: “See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time for the days are evil. Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of God is. And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation; but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another in the fear of God.” We can live out a godly life, reflecting and showing forth His image and likeness, if we are filled with the Spirit, which Paul connects to living a life of worship: singing to God, giving thanks, and mutual submission. This is how God Himself lived while on earth and this is how He calls us to live as well: to do so is to partake of His divine nature and to truly be sons and daughters who reveal the Father to a world that must “come to its senses,” just as the Prodigal Son did. The Life, lived and given to us by Christ, reverses what Adam did. Through one man came death, through Christ came Life and he has entrusted us to bring this Life to the world, to the glory of God the Father, who so loved the world. May God do this in and through us to the glory of His Name and the salvation of the world. Amen.
I do want to thank the church for their kind and generous reception of my family and me. May God bless their efforts to live His Kingdom out in New Castle.
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Text: Luke 15:11-32 (The Prodigal Son)
In the parable of the Prodigal Son, we meet two children who, although they are in the same family, do not know their father. The first hates him enough to wish his death; the second assumes he is miserly and selfish. This is an important lesson for all Christians, since we claim to know the Father and the Son and the holy Spirit.
When we come to Church, we assume that we are worshipping the right God, the “only true God,” as Jesus puts it in John’s Gospel. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here. But, how do we know that the God we have assembled here to honor and serve is the God, the Creator of the universe, the one worthy of our acclamation and our lives? I raise this question because it seems that within the Christian world there are “many gods and many lords” (as the Apostle Paul speaks about it), but “for us there” should be “one God, the Father…and one Lord Jesus Christ.” The Christian God is often seen as either for all American wars, regardless of their justification, or against any wars, no matter how just they might actually be. We are told that God is vengeful and angry; yet He is Love. Placards, splayed over the evening news, read “God hates…” whatever group is not like the protestors, whether that is homosexuals, or soldiers, or even the Amish. There seems to be great confusion as to who God is and how we are to live in light of that. However, there is only one God and He is not the author of confusion: we must wade through this quagmire, this miry clay as Psalm 40 calls it, to the point where we can say not only that we believe in God (which James tells us even the demons do), but that we know Him and, more importantly, that He knows us.
Why, though, is it important to know God? Wouldn’t it just be easier to offer up some sacrifice, whether an animal or some prayer, to an all-powerful Being that we just don’t understand? Most of human history, it seems, has functioned this way. Luke tells us the story of Paul’s encounter with the “unknown god” in Acts 17: this ‘god’ had delivered them from plague and floods when all the other gods of the Grecian world had failed. Paul, though, will not let them stay in ignorance, for “God now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom He has ordained.” Maybe it would be easier to offer to some “unknown God” that all spiritual paths lead to, but in the reality of the situation, it is certainly not safer. Justice is coming – the Judge is at the doors!
But judgment isn’t the only reason that we should seek to truly know God. One genuinely true law of spirituality is that “we become like what we worship.” That is, whatever god we worship, we take on their traits. If we worship a god who is always wrathful and angry, we ourselves will become wrathful and angry. We see that with the “God hates…” crowd. If we worship a god who is kindly and benevolent, without any sense of justice or truth, we become soft and easily taken advantage of: it is a sad story of our country that many mainline Christian denominations have followed this path. The Apostle Peter, in his second epistle, says that we are to be “partakers of the divine nature.” We must ask who God is because we’re going to be like Him.
The language of “partaking of the divine nature” may sound strange. We talk much more often of salvation or redemption and even sanctification; however this language is very close to what God intended in the very beginning. In Genesis 1:26, the Word says “Let Us make man in our Image, according to Our likeness.” Somehow, in a very mysterious way, we partook of God’s image, His very nature. That image involved being in God’s likeness as well. We were supposed to act like God Himself. The Genesis passage continues, explaining this: “let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Adam and Eve were set up as lords of the world; however there was a proviso: they could not eat from one of the trees in the midst of the garden God planted for them. The reason given was that “on the day you eat of it you will be liable to death.” This divine warning is very important: if you disobey, Adam, you will be cut off from what makes you live – right now, you have perfect communion with Me and I have given you every good gift, including the Tree of Life in the midst of the Garden, so you will live forever in peace and joy. God knows that this will be a struggle for the newly formed image-bearers, yet He entrusts the task to them.
We may be surprised, then, to learn that when the serpent deceives Eve, he does so through their desire to be like God. This desire to partake of the divine nature is not a bad thing: man and woman were made in the image and likeness of God. However, the serpent tells Eve (and the text tells us that Adam was with her, silent the whole time: she was deceived, Adam went in with full knowledge) that they have yet to become like God, knowing good and evil. The reason that God withheld the tree was not to grow them in obedience, but rather to separate Himself from them, the ones created in His very image and likeness! The serpent’s condemnation is just. Why did Adam and Eve, who should have known better, take the bait and eat from the tree? The Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 1:21-22: “although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools.” It started with false worship in which they became unthankful. Then they became futile in their thoughts and started to believe in another god, not the God who had selflessly made them and entrusted them with the Garden, but a petty, miserly god who selfishly kept back secrets all to himself. They became like what they worshipped: Adam selfishly blames Eve and God Himself for the predicament, instead of repenting and seeking God’s mercy. Because of this we are trapped in the “corruption that is in the world through lust,” as Peter puts it, summarizing the effects of Adam’s sin. When we have a wrong knowledge of who God is, we worship wrongly and become corrupted at our cores.
Who God is matters because we are to be like Him, in both the here-and-now, and in eternity when “we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is” (I John 3:2). So, to the question at hand: who is God?
A few provisos on our quest would be helpful. I am an academic by training, so I apologize that a seemingly simple question as “who is God” takes a million years to arrive at. Things must be made somewhat convoluted, otherwise how would we turn these sorts of questions into articles and books?
The first proviso is that when we are attempting to answer “who” someone is, whether that is God or our spouses or ourselves, we are asking “how” that person thinks and acts. I know my wife because of the way she acts towards me and towards God and towards our community. My wife knows me the same way: my hope is that I portray a consistent image of who I am. Here is where faith comes in: we must trust that the actions are true revelations of the other or ourselves. We project an image of who we are by our actions, so if we know God’s actions, we know what it means to be made “in His image” and can act accordingly.
The second proviso is like the first: we cannot understand God without considering the action that is Jesus Christ. John’s Gospel says “No one has seen God at any time – the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has interpreted Him.” If we want to speak truly of God, and even more importantly to know Him and thus have eternal Life, we must speak of and know Jesus Christ. This means that looking at the actions of and listening to the words of Jesus Christ will show us the “who” and “how” of God. All the stories about God in the Bible make sense in the light of Jesus Christ. So anything we read in the Bible, whether the judgment of Sodom or the Conquest of Canaan must be read with a single question in mind: “how does this story prepare for or teach about the Incarnation, the Suffering, the Death, and Resurrection of Jesus the Christ?”
We do not have time, alas, to go through the whole Scriptures to uncover this God, although if you wanted to get a start on it this afternoon, might I recommend meditating on 1 Corinthians 10? For our purposes now, though, we must concentrate on Jesus Himself as the revealer, the interpreter for us, of God. Let us briefly speak of Jesus’ teaching, his parables, and the way in which he acted as entrances into the knowledge of God the Father.
At the end of Matthew 5, in the middle of the “Sermon on the Mount,” Jesus says something very striking and challenging: “Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” What does it mean to be perfect as God is perfect? Jesus explains a few verses earlier, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you: that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so?” What is God’s perfection? It is loving your enemies. While often our reading of the Old Testament is overwhelmed by the scenes of judgment, here Jesus puts a spin on it that we might not have expected: even the wrath of God is meant to bring salvation. God brings judgment, most often it seems on His people, not because He is vindictive or controlled by anger (these are human ways of wrath); but as a loving Father who disciplines in order that Israel might turn from death to Life, from Satan to God. This can be seen clearly, and poignantly, in the book of Ezekiel.
In the midst of the people’s most egregious rebellion, which is detailed in the early chapters of the book, God decides to leave the Temple – to forsake it and allow evil forces to overrun it. The people have started worshipping other gods there, which the only true God cannot abide. So, in chapter 10, the glory of God departs from the Temple. It seems that God has finally forsaken His people. They have become His enemies, so He has left them. Where, though, has He gone? Ezekiel makes it a point to mention that the cherubim, the angels, that carry the glory of God out of the Temple are “the living creatures I saw by the River Chebar.” In Ezekiel 1, he has the vision of these cherubim carrying God’s glory in Babylon, with the exiles who mourn there. God has left the Temple, that is true; God has judged His people with exile, that is true; but God has followed them into exile. “Thus says the Lord God: ‘Although I have cast them off far among the nations, and although I have scattered them among the countries, yet I shall be a little sanctuary for them in the countries where they have gone” (Ez. 11:16). The Apostle Paul puts it in these words, “God demonstrates His own love towards us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us…for…when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son…” (Rom. 5:8, 10). While we were enemies, opposed to God, with the “wrath of God revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness” upon us, God sent His Son to be incarnate, to lead us to truth, to die for us, to rise for us, and to go prepare a place for us. Who is God? The One who loves His enemies. “Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” We must ask, then, who are our enemies? And how can we treat them with justice, mercy, and love – which always involves calling them into a transforming relationship with the One who is justice, mercy, and Love. Then we shall be like God.
While there is much more to be said about Jesus’ teaching, we should shift our focus shortly to His parables. These stories, at once very simple and complex, continue to speak to us, to disarm us, and to remake us, even though we do our labor in a context that often seems far away from fishermen, slaves, and banquet-inviting kings. The Prodigal Son, a well-known and beloved parable, acts in such a way, especially as it reveals to us God the Father through the Son.
The outline of the parable is well-known. A brash and arrogant son says, in effect, “I wish you were dead, dad; can I have some money?” The father, oddly, agrees and sends his wayward boy off with half of his largesse. The son wastes his living on “riotous living” and prostitutes, ending up in the worst place a young Jewish boy could: a Gentile pig farm, begging the pigs for food, “and no one gave him any” (Lk. 15:16). At this point the boy “came to himself” and decided to be but a mere slave in his father’s household. However, the father sees him coming afar off and runs out to him, welcoming him, waving away his self-deprecation, and restores him to full sonship, complete with a homecoming feast. The older brother, whom we have not heard from so far, protests that the father has treated him – the “good boy” – as a slave; never even supplying him with a goat so that he and his friends might party. The father replies, “Son, you are always with me and all that I have is yours.”
This story, in the midst of a few parables about finding that which was lost, is poignant and tender. This is a father that, even in the midst of utter rebellion, loves his son: he daily watches for his repentance, not so that he can be made to feel guilty or ashamed (the son takes that role on himself), but rather so that he can be fully restored to the household. He is also the father that loves the son who never leaves – but that son never really knew his father! He assumed that he was cold and miserly, rather than open-hearted and generous. “Son, you are always with me and all that I have is yours” is something no Christian should ever forget.
This story is told in response to the grumbling of the religious leaders over Jesus’ acceptance of tax collectors, prostitutes, and other sinners and outcasts. How could he bring these unclean into God’s fold? Jesus’ response, about his work, is the story of the father. Jesus here is explicitly linking his own work of welcome to the work of the Father God. The sinners were the younger brother; the religious leaders were the older brother. Jesus takes the role of the welcoming, running, embracing Father. The Son truly reveals the Father. Whatever we see Jesus doing is what God is doing. Since Jesus makes us sons of God, both males and females sharing in this status, what the world see us doing should lead them to see what God continues to do. This is a challenging charge, but God promises us that He is “conforming us to the image of His Son” as Paul says in Romans 8.
Many other parables could be multiplied to show who God is: often stories convey truth better than propositional statements. It is one thing to be told, “God is Love,” it is another thing to hear the story of a father running to embrace his son that, at their last meeting, had wished his premature death. Let us go on, then, to the ultimate revelation of God the Father: the life of Jesus Christ.
In John 14, Jesus is speaking very deep truths to his disciples. He is about to depart to the Cross and the tomb: it is time for him to reveal who he truly is. He says, “If you had known me, you would have known my Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him.” His disciple Philip retorts, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is sufficient for us.” I find that a strange thing to say. Let us remember Exodus 33, where God tells Moses “no man may see My face and live.” Philip saying, “it is sufficient for us” seems an odd request. Yet listen to Christ’s reply: “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father…” To know God, we must know Jesus Christ. If we know Jesus Christ, we have seen and know the Father. If we know the Father, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent, we have eternal life. What does the life of Jesus, then, reveal to us about God the Father?
The ultimate event in Jesus’ life, which all the Gospels speak about, is his death on the cross and subsequent resurrection. The Gospels differ on many things, some stories are told here and omitted there, some parables are highlighted there, while others are neglected here, and so on. But all of them address the suffering, the crucifixion, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. If the Son reveals the Father, then this is the most important piece in the puzzle. God the Father cannot be known without the Cross and Resurrection – these events are the fullest revelation of His character. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son…” “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself…” “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as the mercy-seat by his blood…” and so on. God is revealed as One who went through death for His creatures, that they might be brought back to Him. This is one step further than the father in the Prodigal Son: whereas that father waited for the son to come to his senses, this Father goes while we were “ungodly, sinners, and enemies” to do what we didn’t even want to do. We preferred darkness to the light of God, as John 1 says, and so crucified our God who wanted only our resurrection. Yet what we intended for evil, God intended for good. By going through death, but not deserving it as He never sinned, He trampled down death and raised us up with Christ on the third day. Now we wait for the fullness of that resurrection, expectantly and joyfully, even in the midst of the continuing pain and suffering we face. We can have full assurance of this because God has already done it. Believing this is faith: this is knowledge of the only true God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent.
Through this faith, which is nurtured and guarded by the Church, which is the Body of Christ Himself, we are being remade into the likeness of God, partaking in the divine nature. Time fails us to go any deeper into this, but one thing must be said. If we know God, we know that we must be like Him – we must do the works of God. But, how can we, who are still so weak and prone to sin, do this? God has already done it: we have spoken of the Father and the Son, let us close with a moment on the Spirit, the Breath of God. Our natural breath is our life: if we cease breathing, we cease living. God’s Spirit is His Life, given to us – we have the very Life of God within us, guiding us, loving us, making us more like Christ. All the ways of God are found in Him – we must submit ourselves daily to this Spirit, ask to be filled to the fullest brim with Him, that we might be who and what God has made us to be: in His image and likeness. Paul, in Ephesians 5, lays this out clearly: he talks of how wives should treat husbands and husbands wives, children and parents, parents and children, slaves and masters, masters and slaves. His description breaks down unjust social patterns that these folks living in the Greco-Roman culture would have found second nature. [Extemporaneous about how Ephesians 5 does this – you’ll have to listen to the audio recording] But how is this possible? Note verses 15-21: “See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time for the days are evil. Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of God is. And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation; but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another in the fear of God.” We can live out a godly life, reflecting and showing forth His image and likeness, if we are filled with the Spirit, which Paul connects to living a life of worship: singing to God, giving thanks, and mutual submission. This is how God Himself lived while on earth and this is how He calls us to live as well: to do so is to partake of His divine nature and to truly be sons and daughters who reveal the Father to a world that must “come to its senses,” just as the Prodigal Son did. The Life, lived and given to us by Christ, reverses what Adam did. Through one man came death, through Christ came Life and he has entrusted us to bring this Life to the world, to the glory of God the Father, who so loved the world. May God do this in and through us to the glory of His Name and the salvation of the world. Amen.
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Theotic Politics
I was talking to a friend tonight about the sad state of local politics here in Beaver Falls. I won't go into details, for they are already well known to any observant local here. Things do not change with any ease. One of the features, though, that stuck out in our discussion is that the goal or telos of government (local or otherwise) is quite murky as of late. Possibly, although I am no expert or pundit on matters political, this is the reason that I have seen neither Obama nor Romney signs in peoples' yards: the finish line being represented by either of those candidates is chilling.
I digress, though. When speaking of ends, or goals, we are necessarily speaking theologically, for a goal assumes a structure, and a structure assumes an Architect (I am aware that this is a controversial thing to say, however the chaos of modern Evolutionary theory is self-referentially incoherent, so I have no reason to countenance it as a viable option). The telos of all life, whether we are speaking of the specifics of "the art of living together" or not, is to be united to God, to have God's Life work in and through us: to be filled with His light and love to the utmost brim. In a word, theosis. We are to be by grace what Christ Himself is by nature. I have argued that elsewhere on this blog. While I initially chaffed at the doctrine, I have come to see that it is the Chestertonian "Golden Spike" that fits the hole in the world, perfectly.
If theosis is the ultimate goal, that God might be "all in all" (I Cor. 15) for Christ "fills everything in every way" (Eph. 1) already, then that has political implications, especially at the structural level. Our "art of living together" is supposed to work towards the filling of our social and civic life with God's Life. Our societas is to be an outpouring and indwelling of the holy Spirit. All levels of government, from the basics of self-government (ascesis) to magisterial government, are to be oriented (and Romans 8, I think, can be argued to assert that they are already oriented: "predestined to be conformed to the image of the Son") towards this telos.
The cash out of this (and I do realize that I am painting with broad brush strokes -- this is a blog, after all) is that our local life together here in Beaver Falls is oriented wrongly. It is not theotic. And if something is not theotic, not oriented towards filling the world with God's Life, then it is oriented towards death. There is no other option. Death, certainly, doesn't happen in a day at the civic level, but I think it would be hard -- if not impossible -- for any denizen of Beaver Falls to argue that we are not in a state of civic death. Part and parcel of this must be the realization that holding onto the past, the "good old days" of steel mill prosperity and abundance, must stop. They were not "good old days" because they were not theotic: they partook of human avarice (let us not forget that greed is still a capital sin), a debasement of the human person via industrial drudgery, and a destruction of the necessary natural capital of the area (the water, the air, and the land still bear scars and are choked with poisons of various sorts). If Beaver Falls, and anyplace, is to be full of life, it must be full of Life. Our old way of life, that life that pines for material prosperity at any cost, must be put to death on Christ's cross. God forgive us for not doing that as of yet.
The first rule of theotic politics is "love the Lord your God with all of your heart, mind and strength"; the second is like unto it, "love your neighbor as yourself." How shall we love God and neighbor politically? It involves putting our political aspirations, both individual and corporate, to death: do we want the "good old days"? This dream must be forsaken. Instead, we must "do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God." We cannot bring Beaver Falls to life, or to Life; God must do that through His Body, the Church. However, the politicos and concerned citizens can take two concrete actions for that to happen: join the Church and clear away the impediments to the Church's work. In the midst of that, they will see that taxes do not need to be what they are, nor do we need to kill business proposals through a thousand qualifications, but rather we must trust that the Spirit is working in our political freedoms to start businesses, to raise families, to clean up our environs, and to worship God.
Theosis does not happen in a day, it is a constant struggle: but we are called to nothing less.
Saturday, June 02, 2012
Review: Early Christian Attitudes Towards Images
Steven Bigham, Early Christian Attitudes Towards Images (Rollinsford, NH: Orthodox Research Institute), 2004.
Dr. Steven Bigham has done the theological world a great service with his readable, concise, and well-argued little book. One does not have to go far on the internet, especially if one is associated with the "Reformed Catholicity" movement that sprang out of the defunct "Federal Vision" movement in the Reformed Christian world, to see back-and-forth on the question of early Christian (and therefore normative) attitudes and views towards the use of images liturgically. This seems to be because some (many?) who tred the Mercerburg-Moscow road end up crossing either the Tiber or the Bosphorus, both locations having well-developed iconographic traditions. Responses by the leading theologians of the movement (such as Peter Leithart or James Jordan) often include statements to the effect that early Christians were universally opposed to figurative art being used liturgically, as that would constitute idolatry. If that is what the early Christians believed, this would be a linchpin argument for Reformed scholars over against the Tradition of both Rome and the Orthodox. Bigham, however, puts the lie to this line of argumentation: every Reformed scholar should carefully consider this book and the argument presented.
Bigham's argument is simple enough: determine whether or not early (from AD 33-313) Christians were aniconic and iconophobic; that is, whether they had any images (whether liturgical or not) and, if not, was it because imagery was viewed as essentially idolatrous. He does this by examining two major parts of any iconoclastic argument: the "hostility theory" and a "rigorist" (a favorite word of Bigham's) interpretation of the 2nd Commandment.
The "hostility theory" states "that the early Christians had no images and were hostile to them because their religion forbade figurative art" (1). Most scholars, especially those from Protestant backgrounds (although Bigham notes various Roman Catholic scholars who also hold to this point), hold to some form or other of the "hostility theory." This raises the question: if the early Christians were uniformly and universally anti-image (aniconic), then how did the iconic tradition, codified in the 7th Ecumenical Council, get such a strong and enduring footing in the Church of Jesus Christ? The dominant theory, which one can see in much Reformed scholarship on Church history, is that the conservative clergy (who were more loyal to the Jewish aniconia that they inherited) bowed to popular pressure from the laity, which was unwilling to jettison their pagan ways upon entry into the Church. After time, especially after the linking of Church and Empire with the conversion of Constantine (and its aftereffects), the clergy joined the party and even came to defend and promote the use of liturgical images.
However, Bigham notes, "The strength or weakness of the modern form of the hostility theory, as well as of Byzantine iconoclasm itself, depends on whether an icon is distinguished from an idol, veneration from worship" (9). An icon is honored (or venerated) due to the role of those pictured in redemptive history (in which I include Church history, since Christ is still redeeming the world through His people); God alone is worshipped. Veneration is visual, worship is not (since God the Father is invisible); Christ is venerated and worshipped together, since He is theandros -- this, of course, is one of the more controversial claims of any iconodule, a lover of icons. If an icon is an idol, then the clergy-laity split not only is the only workable theory, but also one of the greatest tragedies of Church history. This raises the question of whether or not the holy Spirit is actually guiding Christ's Church into all truth. Bigham rejects this theory based on the close differentiation between an icon (to be honored because of who is pictured) and an idol (which claims to at least represent a god or God the Father). The early Christians (or, at least, the bishops and lay teachers: the run-of-the-mill lay Christian did not leave writings for us, but they did leave Church art) were implacably opposed to idolatry, which all parties (Protestant, Orthodox, Catholic) agree on. However, and this is the brunt of Bigham's work, they were not opposed to "non-idolatrous figurative art" (as Bigham normally describes it), even in the context of the Church's liturgy. He argues this by going through all relevant early Church sources, both written and non-written (painting, mosaic, sculpture), and determining the attitude towards art being presented. In each case, with the possible exception of one possibly inauthentic letter in Eusebius' corpus, the early Christians either are silent concerning non-idolatrous art or speak positively concerning it. Part of the problem, Bigham argues, is that "hostility theorists" come to the table with a set of errant presuppositions that color their reading of the evidence.
By the end of the book, it is obvious that non-idolatrous art was not a major concern of early Christian writers. Idolatrous art, of course, is and will continue to be till the establishment and conquest of Christendom. To argue that early Christians uniformly were aniconic or iconophobic is a misreading of the evidence based on faulty presuppositions. Where, though, do these faulty presuppositions come from? Bigham argues a falsely "rigorist" interpretation of the 2nd Commandment.
"You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them..." Thus speaks the 2nd Commandment, which seems to forbid any figurative art, not just idols ("or any likeness..."). However (and Bigham doesn't argue from the Masoretic or Septuagintal text grammatically here, which would only bolster his case), the Old Testament itself should give pause to any such "rigorist" interpretation: five chapters of Exodus later, God Himself commands golden cherubim ("in heaven above") to be crafted for His glory, cherubim to be woven on the tabernacle linens, a bronze serpent to be made for the healing of His rebellious people, and so on (25-32). For adherents to the Regulative Principle of Worship (RPW), which many Reformed people are, this should give pause. The point of the 2nd Commandment isn't the forbidding of images, whether liturgical or not, but rather the forbidding of idols, that which is worshipped instead of God. God Himself, in the Old Testament at least, is not to be figured artistically, but (and this is the point of St. John of Damascus) since God has appeared in the flesh, giving His own icon (or image, as in, "He is the image of the invisible God" from Colossians 2 and elsewhere), we are now allowed to make liturgical use of it. Bigham does not get into what the proper liturgical use of non-idolatrous art is (a debate that I, at least, consider far from over, at least as far as Protestant-Orthodox dialogue goes), but does set the stage for fruitful dialogue. Early Christians did not have a problem with non-idolatrous figurative art, nor did they interpret the 2nd Commandment in a "rigorist" (RPW-like) way; rather, there are more questions and further research that needs to be done, especially on how such images should be "used" in a liturgical context.
Friday, June 01, 2012
The Importance of Ignorance
The truth is: I don't know.
I've studied theology, and engaged in prayer (which, as Evagrius of Pontus reminds us, shouldn't ever be separated), for a long time now, at least relatively speaking. And this is what I've found out: I don't know.
This used to irritate me. Frustrate me. Anger me. Infuriate me.
Not anymore.
The best place to be is "I don't know," because if I don't know (and I don't), then I can finally submit to God. Instead of trying to lord it over Him with my own knowledge ("but it must be this way"), I can say, like Mary, "I am the servant-at-hand of my Lord, let it be unto me according to Your Word" (do pardon the re-gendering of her prayer -- I continue to not be a woman).
It is a freeing thing since I no longer have to hold up and onto my "faith," which turned out to be little more than a flimsy set of rationalistic propositions. Instead, I can have a Faith, once for all delivered, protected by the Spirit through all ages (even though it is a messy business, Church history) that is not dependent on my rationality, but rather on His free gift of the Life who is Jesus Christ.
So, I read internet debates on points of dogma or praxis and I don't want to engage them. I'd rather listen, preferably to those who have proven themselves to truly bear the Spirit (the Fathers, many of the monastics, etc.), and from there I'd like to take my steps towards "being conformed to the image of the Son."
Ignorance is the only entrance into humility.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
The Amen of God
Some things are so obvious that I am often oblivious.
In Genesis 1, God speaks and it comes to be. "Let there be Light...and it was so." While not the same word in Hebrew, we say something similar at the end of our prayers: "Amen" or "So be it/Let is be so." Mary, the mother of our Lord, says something similar, "May it be to me as You have said."
We follow God, we image Him, when we take His Amen, which is His Word, His Son, His will, and direct it back to Him. It is as He has said, so may it be as we have said. "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."
God's Word, then, by which He made the world, is Amen -- no wonder Jesus describes Himself in the book of Revelation as the "Amen of God." All the world was created in this Amen, who has taken on the creation into Himself, so that it might be all gathered up into Himself, as St. Paul tells us in Ephesians. The world, then, is a dialogue: the Word makes it so, and with great thankfulness, the Word enfleshed -- as Christ and as His Church -- responds with Amen, may it be unto us as You have said.
Amen.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
A Simple Syllogism
If Jesus Christ is the Life of the world (John 1:4), then that means when he was crucified, the world itself died, for its Life lay in the grave. The old mode of existence, the one brought on by Adam, is gone: death has been trampled down by death. The power of sin is broken. That means, if the Life is resurrected, and we are joined to that Life, we no longer need to live by the modes and ways of the dead world -- crucified once for all -- but rather can live in newness of life.
This means eschatology that looks exclusively to the future, whether that future is AD 70 or AD 3000 (or whenever) is missing the point: the eschaton was fulfilled on the Cross. The Resurrection started on Resurrection Day, an unceasing Day of the Lord that brings all things into God's Light ("the Life was the Light of men"). Certainly, we are awaiting the fulness of this Day to dawn, but St. Paul says that "If anyone is in Christ, behold, a new creation is!" (2 Corinthians 5:17): it is here, we must live it.
There is no reason to be an optimist: the world was died. There is no reason to be a pessimist: the world has been made alive. Rather, Jesus Christ is raised from the dead -- that is the ground of our whole existence.
Hallelujah!
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
The Real Presence of the Christ
This post is somewhat a response to Mr. Robert Arakaki on Orthodox Bridge, a usually delightful site of Reformed-Evangelical and (Eastern) Orthodox dialogue (with, naturally, an emphasis on some prosyletism towards Orthodoxy). Since seminary at Trinity School for Ministry I have developed an interest in the possible connections between the Reformed tradition and Orthodoxy. I realize, after having many conversations both on the internet and off, that there are some unbridgeable parts between the two. Yet, hope springs eternal. I continue my quest to "rethink it all," albeit with a twist. I have changed -- dramatically -- since I started working on this train of thought. The problems that started it still remain (people my age leaving the Church -- this weighs always heavily on my heart and my mind), but my view towards many issues has, hopefully, matured. Part of that (possibly the majority of that) comes from a relatively recent rejection of cynicism. My own words from another journal aptly capture this:
I do not wish to be cynical any more. There is nothing more blinding than to believe that we see clearly when we assume that all operate only under the terms of power, sex, and wealth, or that all but we are ignorant. It is we who are blind and mad for the passions -- Christ is the Other under whom we must submit and learn, whether that Other manifests himself as poor, or woman, or black, or sexual sinner. "He came in the likeness of sinful flesh" to make our bodies like unto his glorious Body...In other words, when I am cynical, I am enslaved to a point of view that blocks off the world: I can only see what my eyes see, believe only what my rationality leads me to, and so on. It was a logical outcome of my original hyper-Biblicism: I could only believe what I could see in the Bible. In other words, I could only believe at the level of my (paltry) rationality, which given the Reformed emphasis on the noetic effects of sin, led me to despair and cynicism. I remember one day (I shall never forget it), when I shouted out to my wife in despair, "Either God has abandoned His Church since the Apostles died or He has abandoned me!" Turns out, thank God, there were more paths than the dialectic rut I had carved (as I've related elsewhere).
When the scales fell off my eyes and I was allowed to read the Church Fathers sympathetically, I started to notice that many of the things I read in them were, yes, the same that I was finding in Scripture. There was (and is), as it were, a regula fidei, a [T]radition, behind the text that spoke volumes in these few recorded words. However, this has made me an ill-fit as a representative of the "Reformed tradition" (whatever, exactly, that may entail). As much as I long for institutional continuity and support, I am both a Protestant and an academic, which means that where I see the Reformed tradition as being in error, I must take exception (this strikes me as eerily familiar to the position I had previously concerning an over-rationalism: this gives me some food for thought). So, when Mr. Arakaki connected me to the Reformed tradition, and the possibility of Platonism lurking in the background of it, I was taken aback a bit. The branch of Reformed theology that I am most closely allied to, the Amsterdam School of Kuyper, Bavinck, and Dooyeweerd, views Platonism as the ultimate insult to any thinker. This has caused me, as all criticism (hopefully) should, to rethink and return to my own thoughts. Everything posted here at Withdrawals should be understood to not be a hard-and-fast dogmatic ruling (for I have no such authority), but rather meditations that I pray God will forgive me for -- they are meant for His glory, but are presented in decidedly earthen vessels.
Allow me to go through my own train of thought:
If, as Paul seems to say (and I've argued in my Chalcedon series) and Irenaeus definitely asserts, "Christ became what we are, so that we might become what He is," then we must ask what He is. While it took me years to come to and understand, I must confess that he is both man (that is, he has a full human nature, including a will, passions, a mind, a body, etc.) and God (everything that belongs to the essence and nature of divinity He has). However, we cannot stop there, because we would miss what he has become because of his sojourn among us. It is obvious from John's Gospel that the humanity which Christ assumed at the beginning of the Incarnation is transformed (or, better yet, transfigured) via the Resurrection: he can pass through walls, he has no need of eating, he can appear and disappear at will, etc. This is not "normal" humanity. It has gone "beyond" in some way, even if how is hard to conceive or describe. Paul, I think, sums it up nicely in his discussion of the "heavenly body" (I Cor. 15): certainly still a body, still corporeal, but suffused with the Glory and Life of God to such an extent that it breaks up our normal categories (just as the Kingdom itself does). It is a fully saved humanity. This assumes, though, that salvation is more than having sins forgiven (although that certainly is a part of it, thank God); rather salvation is a conquering of death, of misguided passions, and a sharing or participation (and I realize that is a Platonic term -- the use of a term or many terms does not equate with an endorsement of a system, one only has to sympathetically read the Cappadocians or Athanasius to understand that) in the Life that is Jesus Christ the Word of God (John 1 -- "in him was Life and that Life was the Light of the world). The body that Jesus has is the body that we shall get at our own Resurrection (Come quickly, Lord Jesus). But how do we share in this Life now and into the future?
Certainly here is where Paul's doctrine of justification of faith comes in. We enter Christ's Life by swearing our allegiance to him. However, there is more. To share in his body we must share in his Body. We must contextualize that allegiance in the life of his community, the Church (Cyprian and Calvin were right to say that there is no salvation outside of the Church, although I would qualify that a bit to allow for the mysterious and altogether merciful movements of the Spirit). We enter the Church, get ingrafted into the Body (Romans 11), through baptism, and once we are in, we can partake fully of Christ through the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the height of Christian sanctification, then, since we are sharing in the sacrifice of the Son, once for all completed, but always effectual and on offer for us. But there is more. This too easily can be seen as a social club (and, alas, in all parts of Christianity this often seems to be the ruling assumption) that magically guarantees us a "Get out of Hell free" card. How can we start living the Resurrection Life of Christ now? We partake of his Life through his Body, that is, through the Bread and Wine. We must eat Christ if we are to be his Body the Church and if we are to live in the "newness of life" that Paul talks about. For this to happen, it is a necessity that the Bread and Wine be more than mere symbol or "mystical feeding," but rather the Bread and Wine must be the actual, real resurrected and glorified Body and Blood of Jesus Christ himself. "What is not assumed by God is not healed," one of the Gregorys said, yet what is not partaken of cannot heal us. "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no Life in yourselves" (John 6).
I don't, at this point, find anything particularly un-Reformed about this: certainly most Reformed (probably a large majority) have viewed the supper as either entirely symbolic or as entirely spiritual, whence comes "mystical feeding." The problem often seems to be "how can Christ's humanity be present in more than one place at a time?" However, this is only if we understand heaven as a "place" and not as a state of existence (and I am guilty of this confusion -- I have difficulty thinking outside of my own creaturely constraints): Christ, in his theoanthropic unity, "fills all things" (Eph. 1) so it is very possible for him to transform (how this happens, I do not care to know) bread and wine into Bread and Wine, Body and Blood. His humanity, while still being created by God, is a different sort of humanity not constrained by time and space. However, we are. That is why, in the reality of worship, we are transported to the heavenly state, which does transcend creaturely limitations without obliterating them (for which I am thankful). Our worship, then, is a mirroring of, and I would argue a participation in, what Christ is, the union of Creator and creature, while still maintaining the proper distinctions. There is, in my mind, nothing particularly Platonic about this: rather it respects the Creator-creature distinction while leaving room for true unity: the principles of that unity are the holy Spirit (Christ's Life) and the glorified flesh (Christ's Body and Blood).
This may sound different than what I posted in the comments section over at the OB. Certainly, it is. I've had time to think and read the Scriptures and see why it is so necessary for us to partake of the actual humanity of Christ (the question has been piqued because of recent sermons I've heard about how to live the Christian life -- I don't think it is possible without having Christ's Life regularly in us, which happens during worship -- although the Spirit, His Life, is always with us -- a mystery I cannot explain, but I also cannot avoid it). Reformed folks who don't think like me, though, aren't necessarily in danger of Nestorianism, as I (and, by extension, the whole Reformed community) was accused of. If we are in heaven, in the state of existence where Christ theoanthropically dwells, the question of "localized presence" becomes a non-issue. Even if Christ's humanity cannot leave heaven (which I'm not arguing for -- God forbid), our presence there in worship means that we feed on that humanity "whenever we do this".
This has not been a point-by-point response to Mr. Arakaki. I do apologize for that, but I thought it would be more helpful to just lay all the cards out on the table. It is not particularly scholarly either, even though that was what Mr. Arakaki presented for me. Again, I apologize, but the constraints of creaturely existence (time and space) necessitate a more personal and stream-of-consciousness approach.
Monday, March 05, 2012
The World as Sacrament
In that day 'Holiness to the Lord' shall be engraved on the bells of the horses. The pots in the Lord's house shall be like the bowls before the altars. Yes, every pot in Jerusalem and Judah shall be holiness to the Lord of hosts. Everyone who sacrifices shall come and take them and cook in them. In that day there shall no longer be a Canaanite in the house of the Lord. -- Zechariah 14:20-21
Years ago, when I was an undergrad, this passage captivated me. I remember giving a "devotional" in an airport, stuck between the United States and Europe, about how God wanted the whole world to be holy, not the whole world to be "secular." This passage still captivates me, and for the same reasons. It took a long road, but I finally returned to this passage via the Incarnation. God has made the world holy, has made the world a sacrament of communion with Him for us, through the assumption of fleshly existence by the Son.
Virginity is holy; for his mother was a virgin.
Married life is holy; for his mother was betrothed when she was chosen to bear God.
Singleness is holy; for he practiced celibacy.
The womb is holy; for this is how the Son of God is presented to the world.
Water, all waters, is holy; for he was baptized in the Jordan.
Air is holy; for he breathed upon his disciples and apostles and gave them the holy Spirit.
Trees are holy; for he was hanged on a tree for our justification.
Graves are holy; for he was laid in a virgin tomb and was raised to Life.
The Incarnation continues to be a stumbling to Gnosticism, whatever form it takes. This does not mean, though, that everything is self-evidently holy. The Spirit must open our eyes and we must guard them -- through being connected to that Spirit, that Son, that Father in prayer and adoration. As soon as we lose that very real connection, as soon as we make the Eucharist (what is the proper response to God making all things a sacrament but thankfulness?) merely symbolic, as soon as we show beauty the door, as soon as music becomes about emotion, as soon as worship becomes about fear of making a misstep, our eyes cloud over. We reenter, or attempt to reenter, that Death from which we were delivered in faith and baptism.
The whole world is holy, the whole world is Spiritual, the whole world is baptized into Christ's death, for his death is the death of the world's Life, and the whole world will be raised as we are raised (Romans 8). Lord, give us eyes to see and hearts to believe.
This Spirituality is not the same thing as the esoteric and nonsensical division between the "sacred" and the "profane." Instead it is the affirmation that all creation -- all corporeality and incorporeality -- is created good by God, yet exists in a state of fallennes and corruption. It cannot be affirmed as it currently stands, but must go through the death of Jesus Christ -- which he willingly undergoes for the sake of the world -- and be raised in newness of his Life. Mankind, though, is the vanguard. Our union with him is the restoration of all things.
Hallelujah.
Years ago, when I was an undergrad, this passage captivated me. I remember giving a "devotional" in an airport, stuck between the United States and Europe, about how God wanted the whole world to be holy, not the whole world to be "secular." This passage still captivates me, and for the same reasons. It took a long road, but I finally returned to this passage via the Incarnation. God has made the world holy, has made the world a sacrament of communion with Him for us, through the assumption of fleshly existence by the Son.
Virginity is holy; for his mother was a virgin.
Married life is holy; for his mother was betrothed when she was chosen to bear God.
Singleness is holy; for he practiced celibacy.
The womb is holy; for this is how the Son of God is presented to the world.
Water, all waters, is holy; for he was baptized in the Jordan.
Air is holy; for he breathed upon his disciples and apostles and gave them the holy Spirit.
Trees are holy; for he was hanged on a tree for our justification.
Graves are holy; for he was laid in a virgin tomb and was raised to Life.
The Incarnation continues to be a stumbling to Gnosticism, whatever form it takes. This does not mean, though, that everything is self-evidently holy. The Spirit must open our eyes and we must guard them -- through being connected to that Spirit, that Son, that Father in prayer and adoration. As soon as we lose that very real connection, as soon as we make the Eucharist (what is the proper response to God making all things a sacrament but thankfulness?) merely symbolic, as soon as we show beauty the door, as soon as music becomes about emotion, as soon as worship becomes about fear of making a misstep, our eyes cloud over. We reenter, or attempt to reenter, that Death from which we were delivered in faith and baptism.
The whole world is holy, the whole world is Spiritual, the whole world is baptized into Christ's death, for his death is the death of the world's Life, and the whole world will be raised as we are raised (Romans 8). Lord, give us eyes to see and hearts to believe.
This Spirituality is not the same thing as the esoteric and nonsensical division between the "sacred" and the "profane." Instead it is the affirmation that all creation -- all corporeality and incorporeality -- is created good by God, yet exists in a state of fallennes and corruption. It cannot be affirmed as it currently stands, but must go through the death of Jesus Christ -- which he willingly undergoes for the sake of the world -- and be raised in newness of his Life. Mankind, though, is the vanguard. Our union with him is the restoration of all things.
Hallelujah.
Thursday, February 02, 2012
On Silence
Ages ago I wrote about the spiritual discipline of silence. I have not ceased to think about it since then, but neither has my experience of it deepened (this is connected to my desire for an authentic spirituality, which judging by that last linked post, I have come a long way).
A few things, lately, have focused my attention on silence (or hesychia, for my Orthodox friends) in a concentrated way. One is my use of language in the classroom, especially innuendo (a Bible teacher using innuendo? Alas, it is true.); the other is the fervid disquiet that I have been actively cultivating for as long as I remember.
In regards to the first, I am reminded by my excessively short version of morning prayer that my mouth does not belong to me:
"Open my lips, O Lord, and my mouth shall proclaim your praise. Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen."
My lips, first in the morning (this is the first thing I say everyday), are consecrated to the praise of God -- not to complaining, not to anger or frustration, not even to my own various creaturely needs, but to the praise of God. How quickly, though, I forget it! When I teach, the demands of edutainment often seem to take hold. A student that other day quite nicely said, "Your lecture was very funny today." While she meant it as a compliment, I couldn't help but think of the massive failure on my part that such a statement entailed. I don't want to be funny (this is not technically true, I do want to be funny, I want to be liked -- but teaching isn't about being liked, it is about formation and inviting students into the wonder that is God's world and God's Life in the world), I want to teach with the full gravity and levity necessary in God's good-yet-broken world. Part of it, I think, is the desire to connect with students where they are: I see what popular culture has provided and I often pander to its level. In the end, though, it is not the lowest common denominator that I need to reach for, but rather I am to be a witness to that which is beyond and above this: what calls us to look to our culture and say "come and see," "further up and farther in," and "become what you are meant to be." In this there is great need for silence, as the mystery of God's world confronts us with both the majesty of His every present grace and the desolation of our hatred of the Light. Too often, maybe to break away from the crisis, I turn the whole world into a joke -- and thereby conflate its destruction. Lord, have mercy.
The second part is like it and to my mind is the root cause. I love silence (anyone, I think, who speaks for a living longs for it), but my silence is not true silence. My thoughts, seemingly of necessity, rumble and ramble behind all my speaking and silence. There is no relief. Normally, as well, the thoughts of my heart are anything but what a man in Christ should think. This often leads to what I termed a "fervid disquiet" in which I hack and burn at my fellows, at God, at His creation. Instead, I need an inner silence to complement any outer silence. I need inner silence when I speak audibly, for only then can I exert -- through the power of the holy Spirit -- some control over what I say. With a turbid heart, constantly kicking up muck and mire, there is no possibility of streams of living water following through my words. I must learn to pray, without ceasing, another part of the Psalms:
"Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer" (Ps. 19:14).
Yes, it is not enough for outward words to be clean, to be free of idleness or idolness. The very meditation -- the muttering -- of my heart must also come under the domain and quiet dominion of the Lord Christ.
I seek, in my overly active life, hesychia: stillness and silence before God. For then, and only then, can I be a witness and a conduit for the Word of God, who has redeemed and cleansed the mouth of man by taking flesh upon himself and speaking the words of eternal life.
A few things, lately, have focused my attention on silence (or hesychia, for my Orthodox friends) in a concentrated way. One is my use of language in the classroom, especially innuendo (a Bible teacher using innuendo? Alas, it is true.); the other is the fervid disquiet that I have been actively cultivating for as long as I remember.
In regards to the first, I am reminded by my excessively short version of morning prayer that my mouth does not belong to me:
"Open my lips, O Lord, and my mouth shall proclaim your praise. Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen."
My lips, first in the morning (this is the first thing I say everyday), are consecrated to the praise of God -- not to complaining, not to anger or frustration, not even to my own various creaturely needs, but to the praise of God. How quickly, though, I forget it! When I teach, the demands of edutainment often seem to take hold. A student that other day quite nicely said, "Your lecture was very funny today." While she meant it as a compliment, I couldn't help but think of the massive failure on my part that such a statement entailed. I don't want to be funny (this is not technically true, I do want to be funny, I want to be liked -- but teaching isn't about being liked, it is about formation and inviting students into the wonder that is God's world and God's Life in the world), I want to teach with the full gravity and levity necessary in God's good-yet-broken world. Part of it, I think, is the desire to connect with students where they are: I see what popular culture has provided and I often pander to its level. In the end, though, it is not the lowest common denominator that I need to reach for, but rather I am to be a witness to that which is beyond and above this: what calls us to look to our culture and say "come and see," "further up and farther in," and "become what you are meant to be." In this there is great need for silence, as the mystery of God's world confronts us with both the majesty of His every present grace and the desolation of our hatred of the Light. Too often, maybe to break away from the crisis, I turn the whole world into a joke -- and thereby conflate its destruction. Lord, have mercy.
The second part is like it and to my mind is the root cause. I love silence (anyone, I think, who speaks for a living longs for it), but my silence is not true silence. My thoughts, seemingly of necessity, rumble and ramble behind all my speaking and silence. There is no relief. Normally, as well, the thoughts of my heart are anything but what a man in Christ should think. This often leads to what I termed a "fervid disquiet" in which I hack and burn at my fellows, at God, at His creation. Instead, I need an inner silence to complement any outer silence. I need inner silence when I speak audibly, for only then can I exert -- through the power of the holy Spirit -- some control over what I say. With a turbid heart, constantly kicking up muck and mire, there is no possibility of streams of living water following through my words. I must learn to pray, without ceasing, another part of the Psalms:
"Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer" (Ps. 19:14).
Yes, it is not enough for outward words to be clean, to be free of idleness or idolness. The very meditation -- the muttering -- of my heart must also come under the domain and quiet dominion of the Lord Christ.
I seek, in my overly active life, hesychia: stillness and silence before God. For then, and only then, can I be a witness and a conduit for the Word of God, who has redeemed and cleansed the mouth of man by taking flesh upon himself and speaking the words of eternal life.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Christmas
While this isn't the first Christmas in which I've actually believed in the Incarnation, it is close.
It is too much. There is no way to understand it; no way to comprehend it; there is only a deep mystery that can be accessed through communion.
In the midst of the joy and thanksgiving of this day, I was reminded of the violence that continues to plague our world -- that continues to contradict the Incarnation by its very existence; that snubs its nose at its Lord's creatures; that can only seek more of itself, although the more it seeks the less it can have -- it, in the end, can have nothing for it produces nothings, loves nothing, honors nothing, venerates nothing. I think of those Catholics bombed in Nigeria today while attending Mass. I think of Christians around the Middle East who have been persecuted by others or displaced by occupying foreign armies.
To end violence in the world, we must first end violence in ourselves.
This will not, of course, guarantee our own freedom from violence -- the example of our Lord shows that such is the opposite of the case -- but it does guarantee that we will not increase violence and oppression, nor will we violate our neighbors.
The truly free man is the one who gives his neighbor freedom.
We cannot decree Muslim extremism unless we are willing to decry American imperialism or Christian colonialism.
"But they started it...!"
And as my dad would say, "So what? You finish it."
There can be no end of violence unless we are put to death in Christ.
Here is one of the mysteries of the Incarnation: he became what we are so that we might become what he is. The Incarnation, the taking on of Adamic flesh and redeeming it, necessarily ends in the Crucifixion. Not only was his coming an assault on the kingdom of darkness, but an assault on our willed complicity: here is a human will completely in subjection to the divine will -- we shall kill it. We have not, nor have we ever, wanted to be in subjection to God's will, even though it is freedom. We have wanted self-actualization, individual freedom, or whatever slogan we comfort ourselves with. And so we will kill the Son of God, or any son of God, to maintain it. To truly live we must join Christ on the cross. For then we have new birth -- a birth into a harder existence: but freedom is hard. It will take much work to become that which Christ is making us, but he continues to be the main actor; we are his workmanship. But we must walk. This is why the virgin birth, baptism, and the cross are so closely connected: they all say, "he became what we are so that we might become what he is". We must be born of the Virgin, the Church; we must descend into the Jordan, taking up the name and cause of sinners; we must be crucified and raised for the sake of the world.
If we are to live, to truly live, we must partake of Christ, which requires our death.
To end violence in the world, we must end violence in ourselves.
It is too much. There is no way to understand it; no way to comprehend it; there is only a deep mystery that can be accessed through communion.
In the midst of the joy and thanksgiving of this day, I was reminded of the violence that continues to plague our world -- that continues to contradict the Incarnation by its very existence; that snubs its nose at its Lord's creatures; that can only seek more of itself, although the more it seeks the less it can have -- it, in the end, can have nothing for it produces nothings, loves nothing, honors nothing, venerates nothing. I think of those Catholics bombed in Nigeria today while attending Mass. I think of Christians around the Middle East who have been persecuted by others or displaced by occupying foreign armies.
To end violence in the world, we must first end violence in ourselves.
This will not, of course, guarantee our own freedom from violence -- the example of our Lord shows that such is the opposite of the case -- but it does guarantee that we will not increase violence and oppression, nor will we violate our neighbors.
The truly free man is the one who gives his neighbor freedom.
We cannot decree Muslim extremism unless we are willing to decry American imperialism or Christian colonialism.
"But they started it...!"
And as my dad would say, "So what? You finish it."
There can be no end of violence unless we are put to death in Christ.
Here is one of the mysteries of the Incarnation: he became what we are so that we might become what he is. The Incarnation, the taking on of Adamic flesh and redeeming it, necessarily ends in the Crucifixion. Not only was his coming an assault on the kingdom of darkness, but an assault on our willed complicity: here is a human will completely in subjection to the divine will -- we shall kill it. We have not, nor have we ever, wanted to be in subjection to God's will, even though it is freedom. We have wanted self-actualization, individual freedom, or whatever slogan we comfort ourselves with. And so we will kill the Son of God, or any son of God, to maintain it. To truly live we must join Christ on the cross. For then we have new birth -- a birth into a harder existence: but freedom is hard. It will take much work to become that which Christ is making us, but he continues to be the main actor; we are his workmanship. But we must walk. This is why the virgin birth, baptism, and the cross are so closely connected: they all say, "he became what we are so that we might become what he is". We must be born of the Virgin, the Church; we must descend into the Jordan, taking up the name and cause of sinners; we must be crucified and raised for the sake of the world.
If we are to live, to truly live, we must partake of Christ, which requires our death.
To end violence in the world, we must end violence in ourselves.
Saturday, December 03, 2011
Other things...tasty things
I usually blog about theology here, however I do have other passions. One of these passions is baking -- I've only started this complex artform in the last 5 years, mostly out of necessity (our coffeeshop needed baked goods and I'm free labor). I've grown to appreciate and love this craft, even though I have precious little time to devote to it. Yeasted breads are by far my favorite things to produce. Here are some photos from this week, in which, uncharacteristically, I've been able to bake a lot more than usual (once again, somewhat out of necessity as our shop baker resigned to work at -- of all places -- a bakery).
First is some croissants and pain au chocolat (croissants with chocolate in them) that I made to celebrate Bethany's birthday: I can make cakes, but French pastries say "I love you" instead of "Oh yeah, I should make you a cake".
Second is cheese Danishes and pain aux raisin (literally, "bread with raisins," but it is tastier if you say it in French). I made these, well, because. Just because. I've wanted to make danishes for a long time (as they are my favorite sweet bread), but have always been too fearful of them. However, I found an excellent recipe courtesy of The Fresh Loaf and was able to make them and the raisin cakes from the same basic dough. Always a plus -- these sold out fairly fast.
This last one is the regular ol' cinnamon rolls that I make for the shop. These, though, came out better than any I've ever made. They are pillowy and huge and tasty. I might have one for lunch.
Apart from this I made 2 batches of scones, 3 trays of cookies, 2 batches of jumbo berry muffins, 3 pies, and 4 loaves of bread (with one more that I'll be making with my daughter tomorrow). It was a busy, yet wonderfully fulfilling, week of baking. While I won't do the French stuff very often (croissants aren't hard, but they do require a lot of you), much of what I do will be available at the shop every week.
Just to get a little bit of theology in here: the kingdom of God is like three grains of yeast hidden in three measures of flour.
First is some croissants and pain au chocolat (croissants with chocolate in them) that I made to celebrate Bethany's birthday: I can make cakes, but French pastries say "I love you" instead of "Oh yeah, I should make you a cake".
Second is cheese Danishes and pain aux raisin (literally, "bread with raisins," but it is tastier if you say it in French). I made these, well, because. Just because. I've wanted to make danishes for a long time (as they are my favorite sweet bread), but have always been too fearful of them. However, I found an excellent recipe courtesy of The Fresh Loaf and was able to make them and the raisin cakes from the same basic dough. Always a plus -- these sold out fairly fast.
This last one is the regular ol' cinnamon rolls that I make for the shop. These, though, came out better than any I've ever made. They are pillowy and huge and tasty. I might have one for lunch.
Apart from this I made 2 batches of scones, 3 trays of cookies, 2 batches of jumbo berry muffins, 3 pies, and 4 loaves of bread (with one more that I'll be making with my daughter tomorrow). It was a busy, yet wonderfully fulfilling, week of baking. While I won't do the French stuff very often (croissants aren't hard, but they do require a lot of you), much of what I do will be available at the shop every week.
Just to get a little bit of theology in here: the kingdom of God is like three grains of yeast hidden in three measures of flour.
Monday, November 21, 2011
The Shattering Gospel
As a student of systematics (which still is somewhat surprising to me), I deal with neat and tidy categories. However, when we are dealing with a 1) living Being who 2) transcends our mental capacities and language categories, systems break down. God, who is infinitely free to be for His creation what He needs to be (the import, as I understand it, of the famous "ehyeh asher ehyeh" in Exodus 3) and who is Love (as I John makes clear what already had been established and confirmed through all the pages of Scripture -- even justice, judgment, and wrath are expressions of love when the beloved has been seduced, defiled, and abused), tends more often than not to break our neat and tidy categories.
As "recreational" reading, I picked up TF Torrance's Space, Time, and Incarnation (note: I added the Oxford Comma to the title, even though it isn't in the Oxford University Press original). Torrance, usually, is not an easy read: STI continues such difficulty. However, I've found that even when I vehemently disagree with him, that I will eventually see that his view is necessary to maintain a proper systematic outlook (ex. I read, for my initial Systematics class at Trinity School for Ministry, a selection from his Incarnation that dealt with Athanasius' argument concerning whether properly God is first to be called 'Lord' or 'Father': Athanasius and Torrance said Father, I said Lord. Now I see that the relational-communion that God is means it is more proper to say He is Father first in Himself, Lord in relation to us, and therefore secondarily.) In STI, Torrance relates why the early Church rejected the notion that "space" was a receptacle: this would lead to a "two-storey" universe in which we are here, in this receptacle, and God is "out there" in His own "space" (which somehow comprehends the incomprehensible God?). So the Church rightly rejected such a dualistic idea, even if it was (as Torrance maintains) added back into Western Christianity via the influence of Augustinian thought. God could not be contained in such a "space," nor could a real Incarnation happen, as God cannot be limited in creational categories (this seems to me to be part and parcel of what happened in the Transfiguration).
Instead, God's realm and our realm overlaps and intersect in many ways, some of which I have talked about recently on this blog. The Eternal enters the temporal in the Incarnation -- prepared for by the whole history of Israel -- so that the temporal might enter the Eternal in the corporate prayer and worship of the Church, who is the Body of the One who fills both heaven and earth. Instead of a primary dualism between two "spaces," heaven and earth physically conceived, there is a primary unity effected by Christ -- heaven and earth, the realm of the divine and the realm of the created, are forever joined by the actions of the Christ in the temporal realm (his life and ministry) so that we can evermore participate in the life of communion that God was, is, and always will be.
I'm still working through all this -- it is quite heady. But I see a lot of profit possible in Torrance's work.
As "recreational" reading, I picked up TF Torrance's Space, Time, and Incarnation (note: I added the Oxford Comma to the title, even though it isn't in the Oxford University Press original). Torrance, usually, is not an easy read: STI continues such difficulty. However, I've found that even when I vehemently disagree with him, that I will eventually see that his view is necessary to maintain a proper systematic outlook (ex. I read, for my initial Systematics class at Trinity School for Ministry, a selection from his Incarnation that dealt with Athanasius' argument concerning whether properly God is first to be called 'Lord' or 'Father': Athanasius and Torrance said Father, I said Lord. Now I see that the relational-communion that God is means it is more proper to say He is Father first in Himself, Lord in relation to us, and therefore secondarily.) In STI, Torrance relates why the early Church rejected the notion that "space" was a receptacle: this would lead to a "two-storey" universe in which we are here, in this receptacle, and God is "out there" in His own "space" (which somehow comprehends the incomprehensible God?). So the Church rightly rejected such a dualistic idea, even if it was (as Torrance maintains) added back into Western Christianity via the influence of Augustinian thought. God could not be contained in such a "space," nor could a real Incarnation happen, as God cannot be limited in creational categories (this seems to me to be part and parcel of what happened in the Transfiguration).
Instead, God's realm and our realm overlaps and intersect in many ways, some of which I have talked about recently on this blog. The Eternal enters the temporal in the Incarnation -- prepared for by the whole history of Israel -- so that the temporal might enter the Eternal in the corporate prayer and worship of the Church, who is the Body of the One who fills both heaven and earth. Instead of a primary dualism between two "spaces," heaven and earth physically conceived, there is a primary unity effected by Christ -- heaven and earth, the realm of the divine and the realm of the created, are forever joined by the actions of the Christ in the temporal realm (his life and ministry) so that we can evermore participate in the life of communion that God was, is, and always will be.
I'm still working through all this -- it is quite heady. But I see a lot of profit possible in Torrance's work.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
The Glory of Baptism
I heard a wonderful sermon on John 17:22-27 today, courtesy of Pastor Barry York of Kokomo, Indiana (the Beach Boys wrote a song about that place). The thrust of the message was that the Cross is where Christ's self-giving glory is fully revealed (it reminded me of G.B. Caird's work on doxa in the Gospel of John), so our glory -- which is given to us by Christ -- is fully actualized in our own suffering for the Kingdom and for each other. We find union with Christ by partaking of his sufferings and we find union with one another when we partake of each other's sufferings. In other words, the Eucharist continues -- even now -- to be a remembrance of his death, which we participate in (see The Reality of Worship for an attempted explanation of this) every time we take of it (I really do think that the most fitting end to today's Church would have been Eucharist -- hopefully someday we'll go to weekly celebration). To put all this in theology-speak, we undergo theosis as we share in Christ's kenosis.
How, though, do we partake of the sufferings of Christ, of his glory? The start of our glory is baptism, where we are put to death -- not physically, but in a more real way than that -- in Christ's historical and eternal act of self-giving. We participate in the Cross, fully and forever, at the moment of our baptism (this, thankfully, takes baptism out of the mode of the "magical" and places it firmly in the intersection between heaven and earth). This being "put to death" is the beginning of our glory, of our sharing in the Life of God Himself. When we are born again in baptism, we first die in Christ's death, so that we might no longer fear death, but live to God in all moments of our continuing biological existence. When Christ tells us that we have "passed from death to life" it means that our biological personhood has been transcended by our ecclesial personhood, our life in Christ and his Body, the Church. We now can go out into the world, sharers of Christ's glory, to do the work that Christ is already doing and has guaranteed success for us -- which is to bring glory to God in the realm of history and space, even as it already is in heaven.
Lord, glorify Your Son, and his Body, that Your glory -- Your self-giving nature of love -- might be seen in our lives and that the world might participate in that love which is Life. Amen.
How, though, do we partake of the sufferings of Christ, of his glory? The start of our glory is baptism, where we are put to death -- not physically, but in a more real way than that -- in Christ's historical and eternal act of self-giving. We participate in the Cross, fully and forever, at the moment of our baptism (this, thankfully, takes baptism out of the mode of the "magical" and places it firmly in the intersection between heaven and earth). This being "put to death" is the beginning of our glory, of our sharing in the Life of God Himself. When we are born again in baptism, we first die in Christ's death, so that we might no longer fear death, but live to God in all moments of our continuing biological existence. When Christ tells us that we have "passed from death to life" it means that our biological personhood has been transcended by our ecclesial personhood, our life in Christ and his Body, the Church. We now can go out into the world, sharers of Christ's glory, to do the work that Christ is already doing and has guaranteed success for us -- which is to bring glory to God in the realm of history and space, even as it already is in heaven.
Lord, glorify Your Son, and his Body, that Your glory -- Your self-giving nature of love -- might be seen in our lives and that the world might participate in that love which is Life. Amen.
Thursday, November 03, 2011
The Desire of God
Today in my Bible class (they are a patient lot), we were speaking of the changes in Old Testament spirituality between the time of the Tabernacle and the Temple. One of the themes that connects both of those "eras," as it were, is that of Divine intimacy (a phrase I owe to my professor and now colleague Dr. Byron Curtis). That is, God's goal, His desire, is to dwell with His people: "I will be their God and they shall be My people" being an oft repeated phrase. When this way of considering God's desire is fully imbibed, it can change the way we read the entire Bible.
Why does God call Israel? Because He wants to create the conditions necessary for His dwelling with men. What does that mean? The world has been infected by sin and death, from which it must be cleansed for God's holy Presence to abide there. Hence the sacrificial system: it is not there primarily as an means of God's wrath, but as a means of His great grace. The dwelling place, whether Tabernacle or Temple, must be coated in life ("the life of the flesh is in the blood" as Leviticus tells us), so that God's holiness, which is Life itself, may dwell there and so that the people may find life there as well (the Dwelling was the pre-incarnation icon of Christ's gift of the Holy Spirit). If OT Israel acts faithfully as God's priestly-kingdom, they will bring cleansing to the entire world, thereby restoring the Edenic conditions necessary for God to walk "in the cool of the day" with His image-bearers, man and woman. However, we see that this does not happen. Israel is too mired in sin and death, too mired in the corrupt state brought about by Adam in the Garden, to faithfully bring this task about. The Dwelling becomes more about privilege and magic (Is. 1:12-15 comes to mind here), where once sin and death are vaunted above God, all that is needed is a few hocus-pocus words, a substitute death, and -- voila! -- Israel is back on top. Israel, the new Adam, the ones who were to mediate God's Life to the nations, are no different than the goyim and must be cast out of the Sanctuary, lest they pollute it so much that God can no longer dwell there. And yet...
God travels with His exiles (this is the brunt of Ezekiel 1 and 8-10) into exile, continuing to show them that His goal is not judgment, but mercy (as James tells us, mercy triumphs over judgment -- Hallelujah!), not wrath, but intimacy.
This helps us to understand, if only partially (as it must always be with such a profound mystery), the Incarnation. God takes to Himself human nature, in the tightest intimacy possible, so that all human nature might be healed and set free from sin and death, from the corruption that effectively blocks full Divine intimacy. This makes the death of Christ not necessarily a "divine child-abuse," but rather the full healing of creation through sin and death doing their worst to the very Creator of the universe. Now Christ triumphs over them, for death cannot in the end snuff out Life (this can be seen in all Christ's miracles and seems to be their main import -- Life triumphs over uncleanness, sin, corruption, and death) and gives us of God's very Life, the Holy Spirit, so that we might live with the same quality of life that Jesus has (what we call "eternal" -- but the time referent is not the dominant idea here, rather the enduring quality of that life: this is also what makes Hell so heinous, it is "eternal" as well, an enduring quality of death).
This should change how we view the atonement that Christ has effected for God's creation: substitutionary atonement, in this view, sits comfortably side by side with more patristic views of Christus Victor, etc. God's love, not His wrath or justice, is the driving motivation and fully grounds wrath and justice: God implacably hates that which brings sin, corruption, and death and is willing to take them on in the Incarnation and Cross so that they eventually might be eliminated. This also affects our view of the Church: it is the place where the Life of God is to be most manifest -- what does the Life of God look like practically? Forgiveness of enemies, reconciliation, caring for the weak and vulnerable (here is where God's justice is fully expressed), and sharing in full communion with one another and with the Lord Christ who has given himself body and soul for our incorporation into the Life of God.
Hallelujah, for the Lord Christ reigns.
Why does God call Israel? Because He wants to create the conditions necessary for His dwelling with men. What does that mean? The world has been infected by sin and death, from which it must be cleansed for God's holy Presence to abide there. Hence the sacrificial system: it is not there primarily as an means of God's wrath, but as a means of His great grace. The dwelling place, whether Tabernacle or Temple, must be coated in life ("the life of the flesh is in the blood" as Leviticus tells us), so that God's holiness, which is Life itself, may dwell there and so that the people may find life there as well (the Dwelling was the pre-incarnation icon of Christ's gift of the Holy Spirit). If OT Israel acts faithfully as God's priestly-kingdom, they will bring cleansing to the entire world, thereby restoring the Edenic conditions necessary for God to walk "in the cool of the day" with His image-bearers, man and woman. However, we see that this does not happen. Israel is too mired in sin and death, too mired in the corrupt state brought about by Adam in the Garden, to faithfully bring this task about. The Dwelling becomes more about privilege and magic (Is. 1:12-15 comes to mind here), where once sin and death are vaunted above God, all that is needed is a few hocus-pocus words, a substitute death, and -- voila! -- Israel is back on top. Israel, the new Adam, the ones who were to mediate God's Life to the nations, are no different than the goyim and must be cast out of the Sanctuary, lest they pollute it so much that God can no longer dwell there. And yet...
God travels with His exiles (this is the brunt of Ezekiel 1 and 8-10) into exile, continuing to show them that His goal is not judgment, but mercy (as James tells us, mercy triumphs over judgment -- Hallelujah!), not wrath, but intimacy.
This helps us to understand, if only partially (as it must always be with such a profound mystery), the Incarnation. God takes to Himself human nature, in the tightest intimacy possible, so that all human nature might be healed and set free from sin and death, from the corruption that effectively blocks full Divine intimacy. This makes the death of Christ not necessarily a "divine child-abuse," but rather the full healing of creation through sin and death doing their worst to the very Creator of the universe. Now Christ triumphs over them, for death cannot in the end snuff out Life (this can be seen in all Christ's miracles and seems to be their main import -- Life triumphs over uncleanness, sin, corruption, and death) and gives us of God's very Life, the Holy Spirit, so that we might live with the same quality of life that Jesus has (what we call "eternal" -- but the time referent is not the dominant idea here, rather the enduring quality of that life: this is also what makes Hell so heinous, it is "eternal" as well, an enduring quality of death).
This should change how we view the atonement that Christ has effected for God's creation: substitutionary atonement, in this view, sits comfortably side by side with more patristic views of Christus Victor, etc. God's love, not His wrath or justice, is the driving motivation and fully grounds wrath and justice: God implacably hates that which brings sin, corruption, and death and is willing to take them on in the Incarnation and Cross so that they eventually might be eliminated. This also affects our view of the Church: it is the place where the Life of God is to be most manifest -- what does the Life of God look like practically? Forgiveness of enemies, reconciliation, caring for the weak and vulnerable (here is where God's justice is fully expressed), and sharing in full communion with one another and with the Lord Christ who has given himself body and soul for our incorporation into the Life of God.
Hallelujah, for the Lord Christ reigns.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
The Theology of the Kaiser's Kitchen
"Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made." -- quote often misattributed to Kaiser Otto von Bismarck
I had always heard the quote above in the variant form: "If you enjoy sausages, stay out of the Kaiser's kitchen." An admittedly odd phrase, but the principal is apt. We like things until we see how the come to be. Church history, for example, is one of these things. We would like to belive that the Church has always, peacefully, believed what She does now -- however, the history is much different. It is a history, much like that of the Old or New Testaments, that reveal a fundamentally human element, yet one that is guided by God to a proper fulfillment: for example, Constantine was an Arian sympathesizer, yet allowed the Nicean Council to condemn it (this, by the way, is the exact opposite of the "popular" understanding that floats around on, say, the History Channel -- if you ask Gnostic scholars, you'll get Gnostic answers).
The study of the Bible is the same way. One of the corollaries of common, naive belief (and I don't mean naive perjoratively here) is that the Bible is the Bible is the Bible. Truth be told, textual issues make up some of the hardest to deal with part of scholarship: there is no one text of the Bible for the people of God. Just in the world of the Old Testament, there is the Masoretic Text (Hebrew), the Old Greek, the Septuagint (which has variant text bases), the Peshitta, the Targums, Symmachus, Lucian, Apollos, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Vulgate. (It is important to note that while all these are different -- and often in different languages -- they agree on the large majority of things: textual criticism is a very careful science that is easily overblown in the popular imagination). Which of these is the "inspired Word of God"? If we look to the New Testament for answers, the answer is: sometimes the MT, sometimes the LXX, sometimes something different that nobody has (usually due to gezera scheva interpretation -- something the Church could do well with reclaiming). This has led historical-critical scholars toward conjectural emendation to produce some sort of Ur-text to rule them all (if only the had read their Lord of the Rings! Is the eclectic, critical text the "inspired Word of God"? I still have my doubts.
Maybe it is best to say that God always inspires His Word, not in a passive way, but in the active way of His Spirit guides the Church through the reading of the Scriptures, even if we are unsure of the exact text basis for all things. Being in the Kaiser's kitchen, seeing how the sausage is made, can turn us off from the sausage itself. We must remember, though, that the Lord of the Kitchen can still delight and satisfy all comers with His delectable flesh. Taste and see that the Lord is good.
I had always heard the quote above in the variant form: "If you enjoy sausages, stay out of the Kaiser's kitchen." An admittedly odd phrase, but the principal is apt. We like things until we see how the come to be. Church history, for example, is one of these things. We would like to belive that the Church has always, peacefully, believed what She does now -- however, the history is much different. It is a history, much like that of the Old or New Testaments, that reveal a fundamentally human element, yet one that is guided by God to a proper fulfillment: for example, Constantine was an Arian sympathesizer, yet allowed the Nicean Council to condemn it (this, by the way, is the exact opposite of the "popular" understanding that floats around on, say, the History Channel -- if you ask Gnostic scholars, you'll get Gnostic answers).
The study of the Bible is the same way. One of the corollaries of common, naive belief (and I don't mean naive perjoratively here) is that the Bible is the Bible is the Bible. Truth be told, textual issues make up some of the hardest to deal with part of scholarship: there is no one text of the Bible for the people of God. Just in the world of the Old Testament, there is the Masoretic Text (Hebrew), the Old Greek, the Septuagint (which has variant text bases), the Peshitta, the Targums, Symmachus, Lucian, Apollos, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Vulgate. (It is important to note that while all these are different -- and often in different languages -- they agree on the large majority of things: textual criticism is a very careful science that is easily overblown in the popular imagination). Which of these is the "inspired Word of God"? If we look to the New Testament for answers, the answer is: sometimes the MT, sometimes the LXX, sometimes something different that nobody has (usually due to gezera scheva interpretation -- something the Church could do well with reclaiming). This has led historical-critical scholars toward conjectural emendation to produce some sort of Ur-text to rule them all (if only the had read their Lord of the Rings! Is the eclectic, critical text the "inspired Word of God"? I still have my doubts.
Maybe it is best to say that God always inspires His Word, not in a passive way, but in the active way of His Spirit guides the Church through the reading of the Scriptures, even if we are unsure of the exact text basis for all things. Being in the Kaiser's kitchen, seeing how the sausage is made, can turn us off from the sausage itself. We must remember, though, that the Lord of the Kitchen can still delight and satisfy all comers with His delectable flesh. Taste and see that the Lord is good.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Implications of the Incarnation
The Incarnation, God's taking on of created matter in the body and soul of Jesus, means that Christianity is inherently an anti-dualistic faith (St. Irenaeus was right, in other words, to fight so ferociously against Gnosticism). That is, Christianity not only sees the created order (the kosmos) as essentially 'good' (Gen. 1), but as reestablished in its goodness due to Christ's coming "in the flesh" (I Jn.) and the eschatological work of the Spirit in the Church (Rom. 8).
This can be seen, firstly, in the interaction between Christ and the woman with an issue of blood (Mk. 5). In the Levitical standards, if a person comes into contact with someone who is 'unclean' (breaks the blood boundary, e.g., not necessarily a 'sinful' person), then they become unclean themselves. However, notice that Christ not only does not become unclean, but rather cleanses this poor woman. He, in the flesh, has brought healing and holiness to this woman. Her flesh is made clean by coming into contact with Christ (notice, as well, the role of allegiance or faith in the encounter -- her faith was an active faith).
More can be said, though. Some of the seemingly insignificant details of the Gospels become radiant when viewed through the Incarnation. When Christ goes down into the waters of the Jordan, his presence blesses all waters: the holiness of God has been brought down to the mundane level. Because of this reality, we can be thankful for all waters. When Christ eats with his disciples after the Resurrection, even though food was not technically necessary, he blesses food and eating forever, which we receive with thankfulness. When he is crucified on a tree, he blesses all trees, for which we can be thankful. Christ restores the world to its wholeness and fulness, even reversing the curse on the ground (Gen. 3) by wearing the thorns upon his blood-sweat brow and by being entombed in the earth.
The Incarnation, then, is the foundation for an ecological ethic: if Christ has made the whole world holy, then we must treat all things as such. All things have meaning in relation to God, especially as God has revealed Himself through the Incarnation. This is why the Apostle Paul might tell us that the whole creation eagerly awaits its release into the glorious liberty of the children of God. Christ, by his coming, has brought Jubilee -- the whole world has reverted to its rightful owner, the Lord Himself, and we are His tenants and stewards of this great, awesome, and mysterious place that has been cleansed for God's Presence by the body and blood of Christ himself.
Hallelujah.
This can be seen, firstly, in the interaction between Christ and the woman with an issue of blood (Mk. 5). In the Levitical standards, if a person comes into contact with someone who is 'unclean' (breaks the blood boundary, e.g., not necessarily a 'sinful' person), then they become unclean themselves. However, notice that Christ not only does not become unclean, but rather cleanses this poor woman. He, in the flesh, has brought healing and holiness to this woman. Her flesh is made clean by coming into contact with Christ (notice, as well, the role of allegiance or faith in the encounter -- her faith was an active faith).
More can be said, though. Some of the seemingly insignificant details of the Gospels become radiant when viewed through the Incarnation. When Christ goes down into the waters of the Jordan, his presence blesses all waters: the holiness of God has been brought down to the mundane level. Because of this reality, we can be thankful for all waters. When Christ eats with his disciples after the Resurrection, even though food was not technically necessary, he blesses food and eating forever, which we receive with thankfulness. When he is crucified on a tree, he blesses all trees, for which we can be thankful. Christ restores the world to its wholeness and fulness, even reversing the curse on the ground (Gen. 3) by wearing the thorns upon his blood-sweat brow and by being entombed in the earth.
The Incarnation, then, is the foundation for an ecological ethic: if Christ has made the whole world holy, then we must treat all things as such. All things have meaning in relation to God, especially as God has revealed Himself through the Incarnation. This is why the Apostle Paul might tell us that the whole creation eagerly awaits its release into the glorious liberty of the children of God. Christ, by his coming, has brought Jubilee -- the whole world has reverted to its rightful owner, the Lord Himself, and we are His tenants and stewards of this great, awesome, and mysterious place that has been cleansed for God's Presence by the body and blood of Christ himself.
Hallelujah.
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